Dreamland

Dreamland

Travels Inside the Secret World
of Roswell and Area 51

Phil Patton

PRAISE FOR DREAMLAND

“A brilliant book in which nothing is as it seems, while everything has a rational
explanation, and yet, even so, the ‘rational’ is its own sort of Dracula.”

—John Leonard, The Nation

“Nonfiction matter to the novelistic anti-matter of Don DeLillo’s recent
Underworld , Dreamland is a brilliantly realized tale of the untold, of U.S. secrecy
that’s been held like a breath and the farce of its being held too long ... a must-
read for dreamers and skeptics alike.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“A rare literary work from the ascendant culture that mingles technology,
popular culture, and science fiction with alienation, suspicion, and disconnection
from mainstream media, politics, and government.”

—Jon Katz, HotWired

“This eloquent and frequently astounding book takes readers along on an
audacious, circuitous exploration of the desert landscape in and around the most
secret military bases in the American West, and of the psychological landscape of
fantasy, lore and suspicion that surrounds them.... Patton has produced the
definitive account of this strange corner of the world and of an even stranger
corner of the national psyche.”

—Hal Espen, Outside

“Patton evokes an idealistic covert fraternity whose paranoia and disinformation
seeped beyond the borders of Area 51.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A psychic probe into the inner nerd of America.”

—Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules of the New Economy

“Patton travels beyond the physical location of Area 51 to the psychic location of
those who must believe that in the sky exists a world we are not meant to know.
...A fascinating meditation on delusion and desire, this is an American tale.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“[Patton] is an observer, a careful listener, a recounter of facts. So he lets UFOs
hang there, shadowy forms above the dry bed of Groom Lake, until the closing
pages of the book, when he revisits the question and leaves us—refreshingly—
with a few open-minded and perspicacious thoughts.”

—The Washington Post

“ [Patton] has written a weird, wonderful, sometimes spooky account of what can
only be called a contemporary myth, a ‘parable about knowledge and secrecy.’ ”

—American Way

“With one hand on the steering wheel and a pile of brilliantly distilled research
on the passenger seat, [Patton] cruises across the arid West and narrates a tale
that is curiously epic, frequently humorous, and always entertaining.”

—Tucson Weekly

DREAMLAND

Travels Inside the Secret World
of Roswell and Area 51

Phil Patton

Villard/New York

Copyright © 1998 by Phil Patton

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Villard Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book was originally published in hardcover by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in
1998.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from pgs. 166-167 of Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of
America’s Fall from Grace, by David Beers. Copyright © 1996 by David Beers. Excerpt from Mission with
LeMay, by Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor. Copyright © 1965 by Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay
Kantor. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Opryland Music Group: Excerpt from the lyrics to “Great Atomic Power,” by Ira Louvin, Buddy Bain, and
Charlie Louvin. Copyright © 1952 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. Copyright renewed 1980 by Acuff-Rose Music,
Inc. International rights secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Opryland Music Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patton, Phil.

Dreamland : travels inside the secret world of Roswell and Area 51 / Phil Patton,
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.
elSBN: 978-0-307-82860-6

1. Area 51 (Nev.) 2. Unidentified flying objects. I. Title.

UG634.5.A74P38 1999

001.942’09793 / 14—dc21 97-48659

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright

At the Boneyard

1. On the Ridge

2. The Black Mailbox

3. “They’re Here!”

4. Aurora

5. Maps

6. “The Great Atomic Power”

7. Victory Through Airpower

8. “Something Is Seen”

9. Ike’s Toothache

10. Paradise Ranch

11. The Blackbirds

12. Low Observables

13. The Decentral Intelligence Agency; or, “Use of Deadly Farce Authorized”

14. Black Manta

15. “Redlight” and “MJ”

16. The Real Men in Black?

17. Red Square, Red Hats, and STUDs

18. El Mirage and Darkstar

19. The Remote Location

20. The Anthill and Other Burlesques

21. Space Aliens from the Pentagon and Other Conspiracies

22. Searchlight

23. “Job Knowledge”

24. Rave

25. Remote Viewing; or, “Anomalous Cognition”

26. The White Mailbox

Dedication
A cknowledgments
Notes

Bibliography

Other Books by This Author
About the Author

At the Boneyard

“You didn’t see that,” the officer said.

We were walking amid aircraft in the Arizona desert. It was a boneyard, like
the one in the famous scene in the film The Best Years of Our Lives, where planes
await the day they will either fly again—perhaps for some Third World air patrol
—or be crushed in great machines and melted down into pure aluminum.
Hundreds of acres of aircraft shimmered silver in the desert sun south of Tucson
—an elephants’ graveyard of planes. Military police in blue berets and shiny
black boots driving blue pickup trucks patrolled the perimeters. German
shepherds rode with them.

The commander of the facility talked too much. It was not a big career builder,
this command, and he talked endlessly about how important the job they did
here was, that it was like a blood bank for aircraft parts, not a graveyard. He
hated the word graveyard. I suspected he had been given this job because he
talked too much.

We walked down the long aisles of Vietnam-era F-105s, their canopies
bandaged white like eye-surgery patients, the tiger teeth painted on their noses
dulled, the red stars commemorating downed MiGs chipped and peeling.
Wherever exposed, the Plexiglas of windows and canopies was scratched, dulled,
cataracted. The sun had blistered and flaked the colorful unit symbols, faded the
elaborate, delicate green-and-brown mottling of camouflage, and smeared the
standard-issue military stencils, no step and rescue.

We passed green oxygen tanks stacked in pyramids like cannonballs, ejection
seats lined up in a phantom theater, white radomes piled like dinosaur eggs, the
black cubes of old altimeters.

There were planes I knew only from putting together models of them in my
childhood. Hellcat, Avenger, Hustler, Starfighter, Voodoo, Thunderchief.
Aggressive names a kid would like.

In an area they called “the Back Forty” sat acres of B-52s, their backs broken
open to reveal green innards. A clown chorus of bulb-nosed helicopters grinned
at us as we walked by. Grass and sagebrush had grown knee-high among
flattened tires. Birds nested behind ailerons and flaps, jackrabbits lived in jet
intakes. Even in broad daylight, the Back Forty is a ghostly place. It’s the noise,
the creaking of old aluminum, the writhing rustle in the wind of dangling metal
and spaghetti wire, the low whistle of an occasional breeze.

I met a man who had worked in the boneyard for thirty years. He was from

Waco, Texas, and his skin had been cured to a leathery red-brown by grease and
dust and sun. He paused from his work and said, “I always make sure to slap the
side of an airplane with a wrench or something to scare out the rattlers and bull
snakes and Gila monsters before I get too close.”

He was removing an engine. “Some days,” he said, “it gets so hot out we have
to keep the tools in buckets of cold water just so we can pick them up.

“This whole field used to be covered with ’36s,” he said—B-36s, the huge
bombers that flew over my house when I was a child, growing up during the Cold
War, under the aegis of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the eagle vision of
Curtis E. LeMay. “Had to bring smelters right out here in the field to sweat ’em
down. They were too big to move. For days there were columns of black smoke.”

Other craft are dragged to the edge of the field, then chopped by guillotine into
parts small enough for the smelter, a huge piece of machinery. At its base, the
oven emits a liquid as bright as mercury, as thin as water, coursing thinner than
you expect metal ever to flow. Molten is too thick and stolid a word for this
metal, which quickly cools in ingots that are shipped off to be turned into auto
parts, pots and pans, folding lawn chairs.

I spent a whole day at the boneyard. Near the end of it, I caught sight of
something in the corner of my vision, a black shape, like a big engine with
vestigial wings, with no windows or canopy—no face—no wheels, its shape
biological, aquatic perhaps. It seemed greedy and insensate like a deep-ocean¬
dwelling creature, with the hungry mouth of a ramjet front, as sinister and
mysterious as if it had come from another world altogether.

“You didn’t see that,” the base commander and tour guide said evenly. We
paused and looked for a while, then moved on.

I did not know it yet, but I had seen my first piece of Dreamland.

1. On the Ridge

Beyond the Jumbled Hills, in the wide Emigrant Valley of southern Nevada,
bracketed by the Timpahute and Pahranagat ranges, lies Groom Lake, just one of
many dry lakes that dot the desert reaches of Nevada and California, an expanse
of white, hard alkaline soil—caliche soil. Rocky Mountain sheep and wild burros
often wander onto its surface, and for years the bare weathered horned skull of a
sheep sat here, a Western cliche as accent mark. Relentless winds lift small
pebbles and drive them across the surface. Once or twice a year, a couple of
inches of rain leave a thin liquid layer, a mock lake, shimmering and wavy,
whose evaporation rapidly smoothes it to a high polish. The land sat like this for
centuries before the asphalt and metal buildings, the wooden barracks and
hangars, arrived, turning it into the Shangri-la, the Forbidden Temple of black, or
secret, aircraft.

Groom Lake is set inside 4,742 square miles of restricted airspace, and nearly
four million acres of bomb range—a space as big as a Benelux nation. It would
come to be called by many names: Groom Lake, Watertown, Paradise Ranch,
Home Base, Area 51. But the name for the airspace above the lake and the secret
test facility and base that would grow there was, irresistibly, “Dreamland.” It was
this airspace that made it special, the airspace where strange craft appeared and
disappeared like whims and suspicions, where speculations like airships glowed
and hovered, then zipped off into the distance.

For years it had remained virtually unknown to the public that paid for it, its
very existence denied by the government agencies and military contractors that
ran it. It was illegal for those who worked inside to speak of it. And fighter pilots
flying out of nearby Nellis Air Force Base were forbidden to cross into the
Dreamland airspace. They called it “the Box,” and if they strayed into it they
were interrogated and grounded.

The most famous planes known to have flown at Dreamland were those created
by the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works, established by Kelly Johnson. Yet
Johnson’s successor as the head of the Skunk Works, Ben Rich, told me shortly
before his death in 1994, “I can’t even say ‘Groom Lake.’ ” To those in the know
it was simply “the Ranch,” or “the remote location.”

A child of the Cold War, growing up fascinated with the mystique of aircraft, I
knew the legend already: Here was where the U-2 first flew, and the SR-71
Blackbird and the F-117 Stealth fighter—all in secret. For years only a few grainy
pictures of the place—taken surreptitiously from distant ridges or by satellites—
served to prove its existence.

On the ridge above Dreamland, I would find I was not alone. Far from it. My
fascination was shared by many others—airplane buffs, Skunkers, stealth chasers,
Interceptors, like my friend Steve from Texas, like the journalist called the
Minister of Words, guys with code names like Trader, Agent X, Zero, Bat, Fox,
and others who gathered here, trying to find out about rumored, occasionally
sighted, or speculated-upon planes called Aurora, Black Manta, Goldie, and “the
mother ship.”

Here, too, I encountered the UFO buffs—“the youfers,” I would call them. By
the late eighties, when a man named Bob Lazar emerged, claiming to have seen
and worked on captured flying saucers, Area 51 had become one of the world’s
best-known UFO shrines.

To some it was the battlefield where the Cold War had been won, an antiwar
fought with antiweapons: spy planes like the U-2 that saved us in Cuba in
October 1962, or the Blackbird that defused the superpower confrontation in the
Mideast in 1973. To one veteran, perhaps cynical, observer of the Pentagon, it
was the symbol of a black world run amok, a cult of secrecy grown obsessive, “a
secret city,” “the last great preserve of cold warriors, a symbol for that wonderful
secret world, a testament to how much fun it was to build hugely expensive
planes and save the world.” To another watcher who was obsessed by all the
strange craft in the air, it was a site where “we are flight-testing vehicles that
defy description, things so far beyond comprehension as to be really alien to our
way of thinking.”

To still others, Area 51 implied craft from beyond our planet, recovered in
secrecy from desert crash sites or bequeathed in secret treaties with
extraterrestrials—craft we were trying to learn how to fly ourselves. For some of
the most extreme conspiracists, it was a place controlled by aliens: There had
been a shoot-out, the darkest of the stories held, and the aliens who once dined
side by side with earthlings in the base cafeteria were now in total control. Or
perhaps, a final school argued, it was a place of the grandest deception, a
shadowbox of saucer stories playing themselves out in a Punch-and-Judy
performance designed to make us accept a final earthly tyranny.

Most of the flying saucers or mysterious lights were simply flares, the military
argued, used to decoy missiles or illuminate targets at night, and it was plain that
some were also landing lights seen through the distance of the rippling desert air.
“Yeah, they are unidentified and they fly,” one skeptic told me, “and they are
sent by a mysterious alien civilization—the Pentagon.”

But those watching for secret planes and those watching for alien craft
appeared alike in their fascination and their procedures, in their careful
accumulation of bits of knowledge, their descriptions of sightings, and, above all,
their elusive dreams of a clear view, a clear video image, a clear photograph.
“Mystery Aircraft,” a 1992 report by the Federation of American Scientists, had

observed a striking similarity between the spotters of secret planes and the UFO
watchers. The FAS was dedicated to investigating Pentagon waste and excessive
military secrecy, but now it had crossed into a new realm of philosophy and
cultural analysis to argue that “it is useful to consider mystery aircraft not simply
as an engineering product, but also as a sociological and epistemological
phenomenon.”

What had happened to Dreamland was a parable about knowledge and secrecy,
about assembling facts and bits of information into a pattern, about learning and
speculation. It was about what the Area 51 watcher known as PsychoSpy called
“the nature of truth” but was perhaps closer to the opposite: the absence of
certain truth and the abundance of uncertain lore, legend, and just plain
“rumint,” as the watchers on the Ridge liked to call it, echoing the military
intelligence terms “photint,” for photographic, “elint” for electronic, and
“humint” for human forms of intelligence. “The signal-to-noise ratio is very low
here,” one stealth chaser told me. Or as Steve, the master Interceptor, put it in his
Texas Panhandle locution, “It’s awful tough to pick the pepper out of the shit.”

It was about mystery engendering fantasy. It was like one of those empty
spaces in the unexplored interiors of continents that medieval cartographers had
imaginatively supplied with dragons and other monsters.

I had driven up from Las Vegas past the F-15s, F-16s, and B-lBs landing and
taking off at Nellis Air Force Base. A billboard for an upcoming air show at the
base, sponsored by a large casino, promised “An American Dream Come True.”
The desert seemed like low-res detail on a flight simulator game: RISC landscape.
This was the country for which God made cruise control. If you kept your eyes on
the horizon, you barely seemed to move, so slowly did the distant perspective
change. You had to focus on the shoulder, with its blur of sage and silver
mileposts, to sense any progress.

Sometimes on that shoulder, sometimes on the road in front, my humped
cartoon shadow ran ahead and reminded me of the exaggerated shadows of lunar
or Mars landers, taking their own silhouetted pictures on some distant dry
surface. After miles of tilted slabs of stone, striated like nicely cooked bacon, the
only green area was a shock. The Pahranagat Valley looked like a dark Gothic
1840s vision of heaven, full of funeral urns and weeping willows, Protestant
hymns and early deaths from typhoid. With its shallow lakes dotted with birds, it
offered the richest land for hundreds of miles around. In the nineteenth century,
horse rustlers used it to fatten animals stolen in Nevada, California, Utah, and
even Arizona.

Past the valley, I came to the little town of Alamo, where someone wanted to
sell a decrepit cafe, then climbed a long, looping stretch of road that crested in a
high pass called Hancock Summit, where the road began to descend and the view
opened ahead. I caught my breath as suddenly the curtain came up on a vast

open westward view across a rising plain. A dusty white stick appeared pointing
straight up in the air. A second later I recognized it as a gravel road, running so
straight and so far and so directly up a slope miles away that in the perspective it
seemed like a pole of swirling dust, no longer attached to the land but rising from
it like a tightly spun tornado or dust devil.

This, I realized, was Groom Road, the cars sending up contrails of dust as they
moved steadily down then up the slung valley, visible mile after mile but barely
seeming to make any progress. It was the road that ran up over the Jumbled Hills
into Dreamland.

We assembled at the trailhead in full view of the deadly force authorized and
photography prohibited signs, beside the motor home that PsychoSpy, the self-
appointed watchdog, ombudsman, and tour guide of Area 51, had made his base.

PsychoSpy was Glenn Campbell, author of The Area 51 Viewer’s Guide,
organizer of the Whitesides Defense Committee, publisher of the Desert Rat
newsletter, the man who had discovered the closest and most accessible
viewpoint. He named it “Freedom Ridge” and was delighted when he heard the
local guards using that name on their radios. Once you could walk almost up to
the base. But after too many curious citizens, including Greenpeace
demonstrators protesting at the adjoining nuclear test site, had disturbed their
privacy, the Air Force in 1984 went to the Bureau of Land Management, then to
Congress, and had large tracts of public land around the base declared part of the
Nellis Air Force Base Bomb and Gunnery Range. But two high points, which
allowed a glimpse of the base to intrepid hikers, had remained accessible. By the
late eighties, the spot began to draw crowds and television crews. That’s when
the legend began.

Now, in October 1993, the Air Force was applying to take over the viewpoints
at Freedom Ridge, and Whitesides Mountain, too. We were heading for Freedom
Ridge before it closed for a last chance to look into Dreamland.

Hiking up to Freedom Ridge, we dodged the brambly, fragrant sage and the
fuzzy, Muppet-like Joshua trees and crossed rocks that seemed inscribed in some
alien cuneiform. The perimeter of the base was marked by orange signposts
running across the high desert and, on the other side of the barrier, strange-
looking silver balls, the size of basketballs, on poles. The lore held that they were
motion detectors or other sensors. Some claim that, thanks to ammonia sensors,
these can sniff the difference between a human and a wandering cow or Rocky
Mountain sheep. In any case, the exclusion of the public has made Dreamland a
de facto wildlife preserve.

I had heard about the sensors and the video cameras and the road sensors,
triggered by the weight of a passing vehicle. Helicopters would sweep along the
border at sunrise to pick up anyone who had spent the night and sometimes

“sandblast” them with downwash from the rotors. I had also heard of the men on
the other side of the barrier, in their camouflage uniforms and white Jeep
Cherokees, known locally as “camou dudes,” who kept an eye on intruders and
called in the local sheriff if any crossed the border.

So I kept my eye on the edge, marked with those strange silver balls, until the
path rose more steeply and, surprisingly soon, we reached the top. And there it
was: I thought of the moment in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when Nemo’s men
reach the crest of the atoll and suddenly see dozens of toiling figures down in the
circular harbor.

It was all in sharper detail than I had anticipated. The base unfolded beneath
us—a line of buildings, fuel tanks, an old bus, the big radar dish, an old bus, and
a seven-mile runway—as well as the white horizontal of the dry lake itself. A
Jeep came up the road far in the distance, then turned around after a while and
left.

I kept finding myself looking back in the other direction, over the valley to the
east where the long dirt road puffed up in dust as an occasional car passed. The
rooster tails hung in the air a long time. The only black birds we saw were ravens
—at sunset eight or a dozen spiraled in formation in the thermals at the edge of
the rocks.

The ridge at the top was narrow, with a back like a whale, scattered with rocks
and tufts of grass and the dead stalks of Joshua trees. It was impossible to pitch
tents and hard to find flat places out of the wind wide enough for a sleeping bag.
The rocks were black as if a fire had singed them.

I worked to wedge my sleeping bag in between the rocks before dark made it
impossible to move. I sorted my gear: My flashlight still bore the masking tape
that had identified it at summer camp as my daughter’s. My rations were Yuppie
MREs (Meals Ready to Eat): Power Bars and trail mix, with a self-indulgent
Hershey bar thrown in.

I stood gazing quietly down at the base. “If there are extraterrestrials,” the
heavy man beside me said, “it would be the greatest discovery in human history.
It would be an intellectual crime not to investigate.” He was stern, almost
lecturing. He had that chip on his shoulder common to conspiracy buffs. “Please
let me finish,” he would say too quickly when someone interjected an objection
or comment.

We had all agreed not to carry cameras to the Ridge, but now he pulled one
out and began snapping pictures. The fine print on the signs also forbade
“sketching or drawing” the base, so the notebook and pen I carried would in
theory make me equally subject to arrest.

“People get nervous when you mention the idea of extraterrestrials,” he went
on, while looking through his camera lens. The discovery of life on another

planet would shake people’s fundamental philosophical and religious
assumptions, he said. It would demolish the conceit that we were the be-all and
end-all of creation.

But it occurred to me: Rather than how would we explain the existence of
other life forms to ourselves, how would we explain ourselves to them? What
would they make of us? How could we sum up life here, give a summary of our
situation now and the events of the previous half century?

The very possibility of such an encounter, like the prospect of Dreamland
stretching out before us, suggested that the exercise of accounting for ourselves
was a useful one: What exactly would we say to them? Would we explain the
atomic bomb and the Cold War, the facing off of two earthly powers and the near
destruction of the planet? Or, stranger yet, would we tell of the end of that war,
and the deprivation many felt from its lack, the need for an enemy to define
ourselves against?

Dreamland seemed an exemplary place to do this. I came to believe that its
legend and lore, its language and paradoxes, provided a strange yet appropriate
time capsule of a half century of cold war and black secrecy. Here, the cultures of
nuclear power and airpower merged with the folklores of extraterrestrials and
earthly conspiracies; their interference patterns formed a moire of the weird. It
was a place from which to see our own planet with the eyes of an outsider.

What you called the place revealed what you thought was flying there, and told
who you were, just as whether you called a group of islands the Malvinas or the
Falklands, whether you said “West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria” told who you
were. People from the Skunk Works called it the Ranch or the remote location. At
Nellis Air Force Base, it was the Box, or Red Square. And to hear someone refer
to it as Area 51, the name used by the Atomic Energy Commission since the
1950s, meant that his interest was in the saucers. Beneath all these names, the
place offered glimpses into the overlapping cultures of UFO lore, of Stealth craft,
of nuclear energy and espionage, and into a world whose common ground was
secrecy.

It was a think tank for Cold War engineering, but with the end of the Cold War—
a war that produced its own versions of shell shock and battle fatigue—
Dreamland was the center of a great network now in ruins.

Dreamland was the tabloid edge of technology, aptly sited near Las Vegas: It is
to technology what Las Vegas is to the everyday economy. It was about playing
the long odds. The engineers inside the hangars along Groom Lake were looking
for “silver bullets,” aiming to strike it rich with superplanes, to hit the jackpot of
invincibility. The players were the most important ones in the military-industrial
complex: Bechtel, E-Systems, TRW, Hughes, Lockheed, SAIC, and, perhaps the
least known of all, EG&G.

Standing on the Ridge picking up lore, I learned about the company called
Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier (EG&G), which did all sorts of things at the test
site, from photography to security. The company’s founder, Harold Edgerton, was
the MIT physicist and photo whiz best known for his stroboscopic photos of
bullets passing through apples and milk drops caught in midsplash. He used this
technique to photograph atomic explosions for the military and soon his
company was providing a variety of services to the Air Force, to the CIA, and
then to the Atomic Energy Commission. EG&G has a building at McCarran
Airport in Las Vegas from which it operates the so-called Janet Airline of 727s
that ferry workers—perhaps a thousand, perhaps two thousand—to and from
Groom Lake. And it was EG&G, Bob Lazar claimed, that first interviewed him for
a job working on flying saucers.

Another of Dreamland’s contractors was Wackenhut, which provided security
services—fences and alarms and guards. When Wackenhut was handling security,
the guards on the perimeter were called Wackendudes. Then, when it became
clear that most of them were from another agency, they became the camou
dudes, or just “the dudes.” Among those on the Ridge, the camou dudes grew to
near mythical stature. Reports tended to wildly overstate their aggressiveness:
Visitors were warned to avoid letting the sun glint off binocular or camera lenses,
as if such a flash of light would draw M-16 fire. In fact, the fundamental
condition of their jobs, as of those of most rent-a-cops, was tedium. Intruders
were irritants and incidents meant paperwork. In the old days, they had ranged
freely on public land, working on the principle of deterring the curious before
they got near the perimeter. The camou dudes follow, lurk, and watch.

Wackenhut, which also ran the security force at the Nevada Test Site (NTS),
had risen to the top of the rent-a-cop business. Like Bechtel or RAND or Mitre, it
was one of the specialist organizations that grew up during the Cold War. George
Wackenhut, an ambitious former FBI agent, joined with three other ex-agents in
1954 to form the private security agency. He was politically well connected and
parlayed his friendships with Florida senator George Smathers, a carousing pal of
JFK, and later Governor Claude Kirk, who did most of his carousing alone, into
government contracts. An 1893 law, passed in resentment over the use of
Pinkerton detectives to break strikes and protests, forbade the federal
government to employ private detectives, but Wackenhut’s lawyers found a
loophole and the company managed to grab contracts for the Titan missile silos
and Cape Canaveral. Soon Wackenhut guards were working not just for NASA but
guarding embassies around the world, and sometimes handling jobs for the CIA
and other agencies that wanted to keep their fingerprints off illicit arms
shipments.

I had met Wackenhut men at the NTS and they looked like they spent more
time working out than, say, reading. Dressed in temperate-zone camou in the
middle of the desert, they did not seem to be students of the natural world
around them either. Now that Wackenhut had shifted to an emphasis on more

promising business strategies, such as operating prisons under contract for
governments eager to “privatize,” EG&G found itself in the security business too,
supplying guards and even SWAT teams to NASA and DOE facilities.

But the camou dudes at Area 51 seemed to be a mixture of private guards and
Air Force guards. PsychoSpy managed to discover—after one of the dudes flashed
a Lincoln County deputy sheriffs ID while hassling him—that many of them were
deputized by the local sheriffs department. Their notarized deputizations were
public record, and he published many of their names.

If by some chance you should see something secret inside the perimeter, the
required “oath upon inadvertent exposure” requires you to promise to remain
silent, under threat of life imprisonment. Few trespassers were asked to sign it.
They were generally charged in county court, fined, and released.

There were constant suggestions on how to get inside the perimeter. They were
like a parody of the desperate efforts the CIA and Pentagon made in the 1940s
and 1950s to get inside the “denied areas” of the Soviet Union and China, and
seemed as wacky as the balloons of Project Mogul, as wild as LeMay’s fleet of RB-
47s over Vladivostok. The Interceptors figured as jesters in this court of the Cold
War: They constantly discussed all kinds of spy schemes, using balloons, rocket
gliders, or model car “rovers” with video cameras.

On the Ridge, black-plane buffs, true believing youfers, agnostics and skeptics,
radio scanners and heavy optics fans, can mingle in the democracy of curiosity.
Even old test pilots would come up here now and then and look at the runway
from which they had once taken off. Eventually I became convinced that the two
cultures—the stealthies and the youfers—were looking for the same thing.

Standing on the Ridge, I realized that its value grew not out of how much it let
you see, but how little: how great the opportunity it created to imagine,
fantasize, dream. The irony was that we were spying on spies, peeking in on
remote locations at people and machines whose job was to peek in on remote
locations. Some of us wore the same camou as the camou dudes, listened in on
the same scanners, watched the watchers with the same nightscopes. Such spying
was made possible by the Pentagon: by the Internet it had created and the
computers its money had developed. In effect, we were self-made spies spying on
real spies. And, I would find, others were spying on the spies spying on spies.

Dreamland had been created to devise spy planes to explore Soviet or Chinese
missile or nuclear test sites. But in time, Dreamland took on the qualities of the
areas it was created to expose—it resembled other, even more remote locations:
Kapstan Yar, Tyuratum, Lop Nor. Conceived as a place to facilitate the
“penetration of denied areas,” it ended up itself behind a perimeter, a denied
area.

The perimeter was only the most recent manifestation of our old friend the

Frontier: the original settlement line, but also the New Frontier, the Last Frontier.
It was the edge of the known, which meant it was the launching point for all
sorts of explorations. It was full of the myth and mystery of any inaccessible
country.

For a time, I thought of Dreamland as resembling the prints of Hiroshige, such
as his Twenty-four Views of Edo, in which objects and structures in the foreground
seem to get in the way of the views of the landscape. But after looking for a while
at this art of “the floating world,” as the Japanese call it, one understands that
the foreground is also the subject.

Such views inspired Wallace Stevens’s haiku-style poem “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird.” (“There were three blackbirds in a tree / Like a mind of
three opinions.”) It seemed to me, though, that looking at Dreamland was more
like Stevens’s jar in Tennessee, “taking dominion everywhere.”

“The problem,” the Minister would tell me in a phrase I could not forget, “is
that the place has no edges”

The light began to fade, the warm sun to soften as it sank. The cold wind
flickered around our limbs. We built a privy in a wedge of rocks, draped with a
blue tarp for privacy. Two teens spoke in a controlled tone, curious, not fanatic,
but credulous, too. They talked of hearing Lazar give a lecture. They spoke of
Dulce, in New Mexico, where there were said to be—“were said” was a favorite
youfer locution—dozens of aliens living underground. By one account they had
massacred their guards and were in control of the complex. There was talk also of
the Anthill, an underground installation near Tehachapi, California, and another
underground base in that state at Helendale. Someone had been near Helendale
recently, and there was talk of things flying in and out of apertures in the
concrete at night. “Say there are dozens of aliens underground there too,” one
teen said, keeping all astonishment, all indications of belief or suspicion from his
voice. “Say they’re in full control.”

As the sun went down, we built a fire, collecting stubs of Joshua trees that
looked like soft, oversize pieces of coral but burned with surprising surges of
flame and then a fitful glow.

The UFO types talked about Lazar. A fat girl talked about wanting to see
strange things—not UFOs themselves, but weird UFO types.

As night fell, the lights came on in the base below, where personnel were
probably watching television, amid the inevitable military tedium that attends
even the most exotic of projects, more intently than they watched the few people,
high above Dreamland, watching them.

The campsites were scattered, miscellaneous, like the social dynamic. In the
middle of the night, I woke to hear the fat girl groping her way down the ridge,
sleepless and grumbling.

I found myself drawn back again and again to the perimeter. One of the odd
effects of visiting the Ridge was that it seemed to make visitors feel an impulse to
investigate, in a vigilante way. So I came to fantasize: I saw myself as a mock
version of one of those explorers charged by Congress and the Army Corps of
Engineers to chart and record distant reaches of the West, men like John Wesley
Powell or Clarence King. The idea of a travel account of a place you couldn’t
physically visit was irresistible. But I got a surprise: The place seemed to spin me
away from me the more I found out about it. And I became more fascinated with
the watchers than with watching.

There is an Indian petroglyph, a spiral, found on ancient rocks in the Nevada
desert, that is thought to represent language. This would be my spiral: out and
then in.

2. The Black Mailbox

The next morning we paid the obligatory visit to the Black Mailbox. It is found
near milepost 29.5 of Highway 375, about twenty-five feet west of the pavement:
a large round-topped mailbox painted black.

The box belonged to rancher Steve Medlin, whose cattle had the right to cross
into Dreamland—and did. They also lurked by the side of the highway, looking
positively eager to be mutilated by aliens, and loped across the road to endanger
rental cars driven by UFO tourists. “Stealth steers,” someone called them.

Bob Lazar used this mailbox as a convenient landmark to direct viewers to
watch for the appearance of the craft he said flew from Dreamland. But from a
mere landmark, the Black Mailbox quickly became an icon as hundreds of
watchers flocked to the area hoping to catch a glimpse of saucers rising above the
mountains from the Groom Lake base.

Could any symbol be handier than a mailbox? This large, classic curved-steel
container, fastened with a small silver-colored padlock and puckered by the
passage of .22 caliber projectiles, was a key trope of the information age, a
repository for missives—some official, some personal, some commercial, the
believable and the exaggerated. It was the perfect symbol of Dreamland. Of the
whole black world, the black budget! It suggested blackmail and Men in Black
and black helicopters.

What you could see from the Black Mailbox “was better than having sex for the
first time,” Gene Huff would say. “Not for the second time, but the first.”

Huff recalled that when Bob Lazar took him out there the light from the
mysterious object over the Jumbled Hills was so sudden and bright they
instinctively moved behind the open trunk of the car, to shield themselves. The
next Wednesday night, they returned and the disc staged an even more
breathtaking performance, blinking and with each blink seeming to jump toward
them.

And this was the remarkable thing, the linchpin of Lazar’s credibility: He could
tell when the saucers would come. After the reports began to appear, more and
more people made the pilgrimage to the Black Mailbox to enjoy the same thrill.

They saw everything from red darters to orange orbs and green glowing discs
that hovered, turned suddenly, and shot away at incredible speed. They thrilled
to “objects that glow with an amber light and flitted like fireflies,” to dots that
“performed zigzag movement incomprehensible in terms of conventional
aerodynamics.” They talked of HPACs—“human-piloted alien craft”—captured

saucers, flown by humans.

Their accounts appeared on the Internet, full of a sense of menace—more in
anticipation of the camou dudes than from their actual behavior. They all had the
same sense of being among the first ever to see. And as a rule the farther they
had traveled to get there, the more they saw.

Was it just because they had come all the way from Norway that one group
worked itself into a lather of twenty or thirty sightings in one night, none of
which was recorded on their videotapes? The group posted on the Internet a
verbose account of their visit to the Mailbox. The account tells of dozens of
saucers and a sky filled with “lazars.” I nearly jumped when I noticed this usage
—was this a spell checker error or simply imperfect English? The “lazars”
crisscrossed and danced across the sky in all colors—laser beams. They thought
they saw fake clouds, generated by machinery, which hid the saucers from view,
lenticular clouds produced by weather manipulation technology. 1

... the first sightings were lights bouncing ... We watched flickers, flashes, and
sparks—also tremendous rapid “streaks” of light from base to cloud.... Now for
the following time until 2:30 am. we were having continual sightings. Up to six
ships at a time, appeared ... We grew accustomed to the ships in such a short
minimal period of time. After an hour and a half, we were “used” to
them ... There was no “threat” no nothing, just playful, curious encounters—
goes to show HOW fast we humans can grow accustomed to things....

I turn and there’s a beautiful “green” ship hovering ... Then another one
came in to the right, an orange one ... [then] a green object, more Pleiadian
shaped than the others we had seen ... At the bottom of it, two bright lights in
motion, but connected to the whole ship, all in orange colors ... It vibrated and
was as if it were alive ... there was definitely a feeling of life &
intelligence ... for several minutes we were paralyzed in joy and
disbelief ... This particular sighting was the longest one of them all, and gave
us real time to “tune in” to it, and become “acquainted” with its
presence ... We were feeling so relaxed about it all, didn’t seem at all strange
that we were there with UFO’s, and the next thing we thought was like: “ ... so,
now what?”

The visiting youfers felt this was their landscape. To Sean David Morton, self-
proclaimed “UFO authority” and erstwhile astrologer, predictor of earthquakes,
and channeler from Hermosa Beach, California, it was the only place in the world
where you could see flying saucers on a regular schedule and therefore the only
place to which he could lead people for good money. Another buff, Gary Schultz,
proclaimed himself “the world’s authority on Area 51.” He established a business
guiding tourists on what he called “Secret Saucer Base Expeditions” and had the
temerity to rename one of the mountains nearby after his girlfriend Pearl. No one
else called Whitesides “Pearl’s Peak.”

Yet the citizens of Rachel, Nevada, in Lincoln County rarely saw anything at all
out of the ordinary. Nor did I ever see anything that appeared not to be a flare or
a helicopter or other distinct craft. Of course the ordinary included all the craft
flying from Nellis, dozens of planes from the base’s Red Flag, Green Flag, and
other exercises roaring over the area east of the forbidden Box.

The Interceptors wondered, Wasn’t it odd that the schedule of saucer sightings
corresponded so closely to the schedule of flights from McCarran to Groom Lake?
Didn’t “Old Faithful,” the UFO that appeared each Thursday morning so
predictably for Morton’s customers, coincide with the schedule of the early Janet
Airline flight from Las Vegas? Didn’t a lot of the green lights suggest magnesium
flares dropped by fighters to decoy heat-seeking missiles or illuminate ground
targets?

For the black-plane buffs, the sightings tended to be more widely dispersed,
from as far away as Beale Air Force Base and Mojave in California. Supersonic
planes, after all, could take the width of a good-size western state just to make a
turn. The craft seen near Edwards Air Force Base in California would soon be in
Nevada. Some saw hovering wings in Nevada near Pahrump, others around
Goldfield. And Agent X spotted a bat-winged airplane over the town of Alamo,
just up the road from Rachel. Dreamland was simply the end of a corridor that
ran back to California’s aerospace center in the Antelope Valley, to Edwards and
Palmdale’s factories, to which the contractors had moved from their original
urban factories in Long Beach, Culver City, Burbank, and Santa Monica.

For a time, Aviation Week would report in great detail such sightings under
headlines like possible black aircraft seen flying in formation with F-117S, kc i 35 s, and the details
would make hearts beat faster. Some of the hearts were in the medal-encrusted
chests of Air Force generals, who expressed displeasure to the editors. In any
case, when correspondent Bill Scott was shifted from southern California to the
magazine’s Washington bureau, such articles became fewer and notably less
speculative.

Some sources for the stories described distinctive contrails—the “doughnuts on
a rope” said to be characteristic of the new high-tech “pulse detonation engine,”
which was a real enough technology but of unclear technical maturity.

There were sounds as well as sights: the “Aurora roar” or the “pulser sound”;
“a sound like the sky ripping”; “a very, very low rumble, like air rushing through
a big tube.”

The black-plane watchers and the youfers often stood side by side, looking at
the same sky, seeing different things yet uttering a common cry: “Did you see
that?”

The sign that warned next gas, no miles was a good enough reason to stop in Rachel,
up the road from the Black Mailbox. But Joe Travis and his wife, Pat, who had

taken over the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1989, didn’t sell gas. They cleverly
renamed the place the Little A“Le”Inn and packed it with pictures of planes and
UFOs, patches of military units, saucer paintings, UFO models, and such
knickknacks. They had a “stealth bomber” patch that showed—nothing. There
were painted portraits of aliens by Jan Michalski, an armless Belgian who lived in
Nevada. On a small shelf they established a lending library of UFO- and stealth-
related books and videos. Behind the Inn stood trailers with rooms to rent, done
in a style that could be called generic crime scene. The only thing missing was
the chalk outline on the floor.

Most days, Chuck Clark was there. “Chuckie”—as the Interceptors derisively
called him—saw his first UFO in August 1957, near his home, just six miles from
the Skunk Works in Burbank. There was a flock of them, he told me, and he
recounts how F-89s were scrambled to chase the shapes. A crowd had gathered to
watch.

He came to Rachel to pursue his study of astronomy in the clear air, and his
interest in secret airplanes and flying saucers was just a sideline. He had seen
Aurora, he said, one cold winter night, and he talked of how the aliens might
come from “another dimensional reality” or how they might be time travelers. He
was calm about these possibilities, as if including them in his analyses just to be
fair.

It was unfortunate, however, that when Clark grinned he turned into Howdy
Doody, a grin he must have had as child, fine on a freckled boy of six but
disturbing on a man of fifty, and suggesting—it wasn’t a charitable thought but it
was an inevitable one—an arrested development. This, I suspect, is why the
diminutive “Chuckie” managed to stick.

According to the map in the phone book, Rachel was compounded of triangles,
although its street plan was not readily discernible from the first view of the
trailers beside the desert, like a cove full of boats. One side of a triangle was
Groom Road, the back entrance to the base. The Little A“Le”Inn anchored the
north side, the rival Quik Pik the south. And at the center of the town stands a
radiation recording station that measured possible fallout from the nuclear test
site to the southwest, set neatly upon a little plot the way the statue of a
Confederate soldier might be placed in a small (but never this small) town in
South Carolina.

Civic spirit in Rachel is aptly represented by the most popular contest at the
annual town fair. A checkerboard is marked off in the dust with numbered
squares, and after bets have been taken, chickens are released. The object is to
correctly name the square on which a chicken will first excrete.

Once the town was on its way to “site.” That is the Nevada map euphemism for
ruin. (Ghost town generally indicates a “site” brought up to tourist ruin
standards.) Then in 1973 Union Carbide began mining tungsten and the town,

once called Sand Springs, was reconstituted, like a dried shrimp in a science kit,
then renamed after the first child born under its new economy. But young Rachel
Jones would die just three years later, after her family had moved on—a victim
of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Place of death was recorded as Moses Lake,
Washington, the site of another secret test area, used by Boeing.

The Inn was renamed after the Lazar craze began to bring UFO tourists to the
town. That was Joe and Pat’s initial marketing inspiration. The rest flowed from
that: the coy “Earthlings Welcome” greeting, the collections of alien masks and
UFO snapshots, the menu with “Alien Burgers.” Joe let it be known that he had
once worked at the base, and did not discourage the impression that the Inn was
the prime watering hole for workers at Groom Lake. And Pat told eager tourists
and press—the Weekly World News and later The Wall Street Journal —that she
believed the place was guarded by an alien named Archibald. Behind the bar
where Joe Travis always stood, beside the sign that reads thank you for holding your
breath while i smoke, was another message to visitors: we don’t have a town idiot, we all take

TURNS.

In February 1993, Joe and Pat decided to hold a conclave of UFO buffs, which
they boldly titled “The Ultimate UFO Conference.” Bob Lazar arrived with a
female companion, in a Corvette, and Gary Schultz spoke. Norio Hayakawa,
creator of the Secrets of Dreamland videotape, played country-and-western music
in a corner. It was cold and windy, but the crowd outgrew the Inn. Joe set up a
large tent outside and when he was asked where he had gotten it he said, “The
boys at the base lent it to me.”

At the other end of town was PsychoSpy’s trailer. Glenn Campbell, aka “the
Desert Rat,” had been a computer programmer for a successful software company
on Boston’s Route 128 when, in January 1993, fascinated by Lazar’s story, he
moved to Rachel. The anagrammatic quality of the nickname, psy and spy, struck
me as right on: This guy was different from most of the on-line characters
swapping lore.

Glenn was in his activist mode that week, decrying secrecy and waste. His
circulars opposing the takeover of Whitesides and Freedom Ridge proclaimed the
base “a sacred temple to waste, inefficiency, incompetence, mismanagement, and
maybe even fraud.” It was absurd to pretend that a huge base didn’t exist, he
argued, when in fact anyone with breath enough to make it up the mountain
could see it. You can’t say about a whole base “You didn’t see that” and have
credibility. The government’s policy of denial was breeding mistrust; the
government was alienating its own citizenry. “The stories of alien spacecraft at
Area 51 cannot help but thrive,” Campbell argued.

Driving back down to Las Vegas I passed through rain and saw a double rainbow
off to the east, arched from mountain to mountain. I wouldn’t have believed it

had I not seen it myself, as the sighting reports say.

At home much later, when I listened to my tape recording from my time on the
Ridge, what came through was the noise of the wind, hissing, flickering, licking.
Much noise, little signal. Or was the noise itself the signal?

3. “They’re Here!”

In 1989, what seemed a clear signal emerged at last from the noise around
Dreamland. Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on flying saucers hidden near
Groom Lake. The gawky technician’s story grabbed the attention of not just wide-
eyed saucer buffs but a wider audience of the curious. Some believed he was
telling the absolute truth; others were intrigued by the belief that he could be
telling the truth. Bob Lazar brought to the borders of Dreamland people who had
never heard of the Skunk Works.

In person, or on radio or television, the unassuming Lazar broadcast a
believability that grew from his lack of stridency. Calm, almost diffident, he
worked a charm that fascinated even those it did not convince. Tom Mahood, a
hardly credulous engineer, who researched many of Lazar’s claims and found
holes in the story of his life, never lost the sense of how subliminally persuasive
the man was. His matter-of-factness lent possibility to a story that rendered in
cold print seemed outlandish and weird.

In essence, that story went like this:

I saw flying saucers in Dreamland. I worked on flying saucers owned by our
government in an area called S-4, at Papoose Lake, south of Groom Lake. I
thought I was going to work at Area 51 but was taken in a bus with blacked-
out windows to a place where I saw the saucers.

I learned of antimatter reactors used to bend gravity waves fueled by
element 115, a reddish orange substance, of which we have about 500 pounds
and which comes in discs the shape of half dollars. I had one but the
government stole it back.

I saw golf balls bounced off the gravity wave the reactor from the saucer
generated. I was allowed to read strange documents—autopsy images of aliens,
and a history of the earth as viewed from Zeta Reticuli where the aliens came
from.

I saw my fellow workers wearing security badges with one light blue
diagonal stripe and one dark blue and the letters MJ. My supervisor had one
that read “Majestic.”

I saw little chairs in the saucers that suggested little creatures—aliens.

Once I walked by hangars and caught glimpses of—I think—a little alien. But
I’m not sure. “It could have been a million things,” [the supervisor] said. But I
think I saw one.

It began with a chance encounter with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb
and godfather of Star Wars. Lazar had been working in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
for a contractor to the physics labs there called Kirk-Mayer. His job involved
particle detection equipment—Geiger counter stuff—and was linked to the Meson
or Positive Proton Lab. Locals remembered him as intelligent, kind but a bit of a
con man, trying to rustle tools and funds for another project.

In his spare time Lazar had designed a “jet car,” a weird mating of a Honda
CRX and a jet engine. The local paper, the Los Alamos Monitor, had done a story
about Lazar and his car, right there on the front page, and on June 23, 1982, the
day after the story appeared, Lazar went to a lecture Teller was giving in town.
Before the lecture, he spotted Teller reading the Monitor. “That’s me you’re
reading about,” Lazar told him, and chatted him up.

Several years later, after his marriage had dissolved and his finances gone to
rack and ruin, after he had been let go by the contractor in Los Alamos for using
government equipment to work on the jet car, Lazar wrote to Teller seeking
work. He had moved to Las Vegas in April 1986, in an attempt to start again. On
April 19, he married a woman named Tracy Anne Murk at the We’ve Only Just
Begun wedding chapel of the Imperial Hotel. Two days later, his first wife
committed suicide, inhaling carbon monoxide in their garage. In October he
declared bankruptcy. With the bankruptcy and new marriage, Lazar had begun to
put the past behind him, to repair his life and his self-image. Teller would direct
him to the people who hired him as what Agent X would later call “the Mr.
Goodwrench of flying saucers.”

Teller called, saying he didn’t have any jobs for physicists but knew someone
who might. Fifteen minutes later Lazar’s phone rang again. It was someone from
EG&G, inviting him for an interview that led to the job at S-4.

Lazar would brag that at the interview he had “dazzled” them. Who were they?
EG&G hired him, but his ultimate employer, he said, was listed as the Office of
Naval Intelligence. Lazar was able to produce a W-2 form bearing a payer ID
number assigned to the Navy; it recorded an annual earning of $977.11.

In December 1988, Lazar said, he began work at S-4, which was ten or twelve
miles from Area 51.

Bob Lazar liked to feature himself as physicist, and in his most widely circulated
photograph he presented himself, chalk in hand, in front of a blackboard covered
with abstruse equations, like Oppenheimer or Teller. He claimed attendance at
MIT and CalTech and said he had two master’s degrees. He talked of “getting
back into physics,” as if he had been a major lab scientist, and referred to Edward
Teller as “Ed.” But he was not a physicist in any professional sense. He had made
his living as a technician and later as the owner and operator of a fast-photo
processing outlet.

Gene Huff first knew him as “Bob, the photo guy.” Huff was a real estate
appraiser in Las Vegas who like many in this business used Lazar’s photo shop to
develop pictures of houses. Usually, Lazar’s wife, Tracy, delivered the photos, but
sometimes Lazar would show up himself. On these occasions Gene Huff and Lazar
would talk. They were both interested in explosives and were part of a group that
occasionally went into the desert to set off big explosions. Huff once saw Lazar
mix up some nitroglycerin at his kitchen table.

Lazar liked fast cars even better than big booms. He once drove a 1978 Trans
Am powered by hydrogen, and he built the jet car that had been featured in the
Los Alamos Monitor, a Honda CRX with a jet engine in the back and the license
plate JETUBET. He borrowed two thousand dollars to build a jet-powered
dragster, a thirty-two-foot-long conglomeration of steel pipe with a surplus
Westinghouse J-34 jet engine from a Navy Banshee fighter. It could run at over
four hundred miles per hour.

Tom Mahood, the most relentless archivist among the Interceptors, traveled to
Los Alamos and Las Vegas to document Lazar’s life. He learned that Lazar had
been born in Coral Gables, Florida, then adopted. No records exist proving he
attended CalTech or MIT as he claimed. He had attended Pierce Community
College in California and had a mail-order degree from a place called Pacifica
University. But the Los Alamos Monitor did report that he was a physicist at the
Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility or, as he called it, the Polarized Proton
section.

A geeky-looking character with large glasses—your classic nerd—Lazar claimed
that at S-4 he was assigned to figure out the propulsion system of flying saucers.
There were nine different kinds of saucers, he reported, and he gave them
nicknames like “the sport model” (a term taken from a Frisbee brand name), “the
Jell-0 mold,” and “the top hat.”

The saucers traveled by means of a gravity-wave generator, involving a reactor
of some sort, and an amplifier that directed the waves. Lazar took credit for
identifying the fuel on which the reactor ran as “element 115,” a heavy rust-
colored substance with an atomic weight far greater than that of lead. He had
surreptitiously pocketed some of the supply of element 115. It was to be his ace
in the hole, his way of proving his story, but it had been stolen from his house.

Yet Lazar—and here he dons his role as “physicist”—expressed shock at the
crude state of the research at S-4 and the low qualifications of those doing it.
They tried to make a saucer run on plutonium instead of element 115, he had
heard, and the result had been a disaster. And they had foolishly cut open a
reactor while it was operating. It was the resulting deaths, in 1987, that had
opened up a job slot for him. Lazar declared that, in only a few days, dealing
with “materials that were—pardon the pun—totally alien,” he had figured out
the operating principle of the saucer’s antigravity reactor. He was a big-time

physicist at last, working on a project even bigger than Edward Teller’s.

If anything lent credence to Lazar’s story, it was that he knew when the flight
tests for the saucers were scheduled—Wednesday nights, he reported—and they
would appear over the Jumbled Hills between the Groom Lake road and S-4.

He took Huff, John Lear, and others up to see the saucers fly. On March 15,
1989, using Lear’s RV, Lazar, Huff, and Lazar’s wife and sister drove up to
Groom, turned out the headlights, and headed down the long sloping dirt road
that runs up into the mountains and to the Groom Lake perimeter. Looking
through a telescope Lazar soon reported an elliptical light rising above the
mountains between them and S-4. The light began jumping and dancing around,
then came to a dead stop and hovered. But after just a few minutes, the light
slowly sank back down behind the mountains.

Huff and Lazar returned a week later. Huff recalls that Lazar’s wife, Tracy, and
a friend named Jim Tagliani joined them. The next Wednesday, the group rented
a Lincoln Town Car and returned to the area. “We turned our lights off, and went
in about five miles on the Groom Lake road. We pulled off on a side road and
unloaded our video camera, telescope, binoculars, et cetera, out of the trunk, and
we left the trunk lid open.”

The disc came up around the same place, and this time it staged a breathtaking
performance. It repeated moves similar to the week before, but now it came
down the mountain range toward them. At first it seemed far away, then they’d
blink and it would seem a lot closer, then blink again and it would seem even
closer. There was no sense of continuous movement; the disc simply “jumped.”

The object was also incredibly bright, so bright that Huff remembered how
they moved behind the open trunk of the car, reflexively seeking protection as if
from an explosion.

Lazar told them this motion was due to the method of propulsion and the way
it distorts space-time and light. He also explained that the bright glow of the disc
was due to the way it was energized. “An explosion was the only thing, other
than the sun, that we had ever seen be that bright,” Huff recalled. They took a
videotape, and the camera recorded the sighting at around eight-thirty.
Eventually it set down behind the mountains, and they left. Huff had never seen
anything like this in the sky in central Nevada.

The next Wednesday, Lazar, Tracy Lazar and her sister, Huff, and Lear arrived
shortly before dusk. Huff recorded, “Numerous security vehicles were sweeping
the roads that the cattle ranchers use to round up their cattle after open-range
grazing. It seemed that this night, more than the previous Wednesday nights,
they wanted to make sure no one was outside of Area 51.

“We tried to sneak in using our usual ‘stealth’ mode,” Huff went on, “but
security saw our brake lights and began to chase us. We tried to beat them out to

the highway, but they came from all directions and ultimately we had to stop.
We told them we were simply out there stargazing, which they didn’t believe for
one moment. They agreed that they couldn’t chase us off of public land, but
simply said they would ‘prefer’ that we retreat back up to the highway. They
issued us a copy of a written warning that said we were approaching a military
installation and cited the relevant statutes, including the penalties for taking
pictures of the base.”

The group returned to the paved highway, but a short time later a Lincoln
County deputy named LaMoreaux pulled them over and asked for identification.
He took their IDs and radioed the security base station. It was obvious, Huff felt,
that the guards and the sheriff’s office worked together. But the deputy finally let
them go.

The next day, Lazar got a phone call. His supervisor at S-4, Dennis Mariani,
had learned of his latest expedition to the Black Mailbox. He was to report for
debriefing. “When we told you this was secret,” Lazar recalled Mariani saying
acidly, “we didn’t mean you should bring your family and friends to watch.”

Mariani drove Lazar the forty-odd miles from Las Vegas to the debriefing at the
old Indian Springs airfield. Lazar was told the test scheduled for the night he was
caught had been canceled. But according to Lazar, they neither fired him nor
revoked his security clearance. He simply never went back to work.

Lazar had violated all the security rules, yet had not really been punished. He
had been warned about security from the beginning of his employment at S-4, he
said, by men holding a gun to his head. He was sure all along he was being
watched. Security people visited his house again and again and dropped in on his
friends. The disc of element 115 he had secreted disappeared from his home.
When Lazar talked with Gene Huff at Huffs home, both men felt sure they were
being overheard by listening devices, so instead of speaking aloud they passed
notes which Huff burned afterward. In the notes, they referred to each other as
Bufon and Gufon, a joking reference to the UFO organization MUFON (Mutual
UFO Network).

But Lazar believed that his wife was having an affair and that it was this, and
not any of his security breaches, that led to his termination. He thought that the
security forces at S-4 had recorded and transcribed his wife’s phone calls, and
that in their judgment, he was probably unstable and a potential security leak. By
May, the couple would be separated.

At that point, Lazar decided to go public. He had already recorded a video
interview with newsman George Knapp, but it was for “safekeeping,” and never
aired. In May, Lazar agreed to another interview, this time for broadcast, but in
disguise.

Not until November 10, 1989, when Lazar appeared under his own name and
showed his face, did the story have a major impact. On November 21, Knapp and

Lazar together appeared on The Billy Goodman Happening, an AM radio show with
a huge audience. On November 25, KLAS-TV ran a two-hour compilation of the
Lazar interviews and other clips under the title UFOs: The Best Evidence. On
December 20 he was back on the Goodman show. By then the story was getting
international coverage.

Lazar increasingly relied on Huff as his confidant and handler in dealings with
the press. He wanted someone else to get a confirming look at Dennis Mariani,
his supervisor, so he set up a meeting with him at a Las Vegas casino, and
without telling Mariani, he brought Gene Huff along.

Huff had been told to look for a bulky-bodied ex-Marine type with a little
blond mustache. Huff found Mariani sitting at the blackjack table between two
large-breasted women and behaving oddly: He was not looking at them at all. In
Las Vegas this seemed highly aberrant behavior. But even worse, Mariani
pretended not to recognize Lazar, and the meeting never came off. Perhaps
Mariani had noticed Huff; Huff had caught sight of another man with him who he
said looked like a security agent.

Early the next year, Norio Hayakawa, a UFO researcher who had seen the KLAS-
TV broadcasts, brought Lazar to the attention of Nippon TV, and in February
1990 he took a Japanese crew to Las Vegas. They interviewed Lazar at what was
described as his house, but Hayakawa thought it felt strange. There wasn’t much
furniture, and the place didn’t look lived in. A man introduced only as “a friend”
sat beside Lazar and even followed him to the bathroom. The man wore some
kind of beeper on his belt.

Lazar suggested a time and place the crew could watch the saucers fly, film
them, and confirm his story. He sent them to the Black Mailbox. At 6:45 one
morning they saw a bright light over the Groom Mountains. At 8:15 a brilliant
orange orb jumped erratically.

Lazar agreed to appear live on Japanese television and had even accepted
plane tickets to Tokyo for himself and Gene Huff. But Hayakawa waited for him
in vain in the terminal at LAX. Lazar never showed. When Hayakawa telephoned,
Lazar told him that he could not come; his life was in danger. His tire had been
shot out when he was on the way to the airport. Significant money had changed
hands as well as the plane tickets, and to save face, the network set up a
telephone link so Lazar could at least answer phone-in questions live during the
show. Some thirty million Japanese viewers saw the program.

Then something even weirder happened. In April 1990, not long after the
Japanese show, Lazar was arrested in Las Vegas for pandering, an obscure charge
akin to living off immoral earnings. He was convicted on June 18.

Lazar had long boasted about a legal brothel he had wanted to start when he
was still in Los Alamos. He planned to call it the Honeysuckle Ranch, and there is

some evidence he filed the legal papers necessary and even had T-shirts made up
bearing the name. But whether the brothel idea was simply a running joke, a
fantasy, or a half-realized business effort remains unclear.

The Las Vegas episode had begun when, after his separation from Tracy, Lazar,
in Huffs singular phrase, “took comfort with a hooker.” He became friendly with
the girls and, according to the charges, ended up working with a prostitute
named Toni Bulloch and helped set up a computer database for a brothel in the
Newport Cove Apartments, a Spanish-style complex near the airport. Sentenced
to community service, Lazar helped install computer systems for worthy
organizations and showed up at a Las Vegas children’s museum to give courses in
computing.

Those researching his probation report found that all government records
about Lazar’s past had been sealed away under a federal “need-to-know”
restriction, further intriguing the believers. Was it part of a plot to silence Lazar,
make him disappear? Had he been set up for the whole charge? Or was the
government just protecting its own?

This mystery, possessing the part mirror, part pewter surface of Lazar’s Sport
Model itself, made his story intriguing. His manner had the same effect: a
combination of bright highlights and dull spots. To John Andrews, the veteran
Interceptor, Lazar’s appeal lay in the fact that he was one of the rare UFO
witnesses to say “I don’t know” about parts of his story. While most UFO stories
were dogmatic in their detail, Lazar’s was full of gaps and limits. He refused to
speculate on the source of the saucers, for instance.

There were problems with his story, of course. As Mahood had shown, his CV
did not jibe with reality. The Social Security number on the W-2 form did not
belong to a man named Robert Lazar.

To those familiar with military programs, the descriptions of the saucer
program Lazar gave in his interviews included elements that seemed unlikely. He
was shown more than was believable, they thought. Special access programs
were famously “compartmentalized.” The engine people were not allowed to see
what the wing people were doing, and so on. At Groom Lake, for instance, the
SR-71 ground crews never knew the destination of the plane. But for some reason
Lazar was offered glimpses of many different aspects of the program. Sometimes
he said he thought he was allowed these as tests of his loyalty.

After he went public, Lazar took two lie-detector tests, but both were
inconclusive. At best, the tester said, Lazar believed what he was saying, but he
might have been relaying on information given to him by someone else.

Tom Mahood’s researches into Lazar’s background had revealed the deception.
However much power “they” had to erase his past, it is inconceivable that they
could have removed Lazar from all copies of MIT or CalTech yearbooks and

directories.

Yet even with all the problems, Lazar’s tale drew an increasing audience; he
created a fascination even among skeptics.

In his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,” PsychoSpy got to the core of Lazar’s
appeal: that willingness to admit the limits of his knowledge, the restraint in his
speculation, and the almost eerie consistency of his tale through interviews over
the years. He was perhaps like a witness who tells too good a story in court. Yes,
there were a few places that didn’t gel. Once Lazar said that one of the saucers
“looked like it was hit with some sort of a projectile. It had a large hole in the
bottom and a large hole in the top with the metal bent out like some sort of, you
know, large-caliber four- or five-inch [shell] had gone through it.” But in most
interviews he said, “None of the discs looked damaged to me.”

Still, it was remarkable how consistent Lazar was in his telling, and PsychoSpy
praised the “impressive coherence and integrity of the story itself.” It is “far
superior to most science fiction in creating a world that could be true. His is the
sort of story I could believe because it is subtle, detailed, and restrained, involves
only a very limited government conspiracy, and does not digress into any kind of
speculation.”

It was just these qualities about the tale, PsychoSpy noted, that explain why it
“appeals to engineers, computer programmers, and other techie types.” It is
“heavy on plausible technical details and free of the emotional overtones” that
characterize many shrill UFO accounts. “If Lazar’s story is fiction, it’s great
fiction, filled with a richness of plausible details and complex philosophical
dilemmas that you can’t find in most popular novels these days.”

It was exactly this similarity to a fictional character’s tale—sometimes detailed,
sometimes vague, highly subjective, with even a hallucinatory quality, the sense
of an imperfect memory washed out by mind control or other means—that made
me, too, think of Lazar as a fictional character.

For me, the weirdest part of the story was not the saucers or the aliens. It was
the poster that Lazar said he saw in the offices at S-4, the one with the picture of
a saucer hovering above the desert and the words, “They’re here!” It looked, he
said, as if it had come from Kmart.

The more I studied his tale, the more Lazar reminded me of the antihero of a
science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. Many of Dick’s protagonists are dweebish,
sometimes seedy, average guys who get caught up in matters of planetary import.
They live in crass commercial worlds while dealing with what they consider
important philosophical questions. And they face realities that fade in and out of
each other, raising larger questions: Are there sinister influences at work or only
demented solipsism? Is it in my head or is something very wrong with this
universe? They often feel they are in a carefully crafted illusion, but that some of

the workers have spoiled the effect by leaving empty sandwich wrappers and
soda bottles around.

Lazar’s tale has this same quality of a half-waking dream. Levels of reality drift
in and out of each other in a strange but compelling way. Details of the quotidian
world blend with those of the Lore.

Lazar, for instance, noticed that the security badges bore blue and white stripes
and the legend “Majestic.” “It made me crack a smile,” he commented, because
“Majestic” is straight out of the Lore: MJ-12, which stood for either Majestic or
Majic 12, is the famed and much-debated secret committee in UFO legend
charged with recovering and hiding flying saucers. MJ was said to be a security
clearance “38 levels above Q,” or top secret.

“I don’t know whether it was a kind of nostalgia thing,” he commented. “I
began to wonder is this really the Majestic everyone talks about, or was it
something done almost for nostalgia reasons?... Assuming the Majestic 12
documents were false, did these guys just use this insignia for the hell of it, kind
of as a joke?”

The flip side of Lazar’s unwillingness to speculate is that the big issues raised
by saucer lore are ignored: How did we get the saucers? Do the aliens run the
base? Was there really a link to Roswell or to MJ-12? Unanswered questions lie
heavily over the Lazar story and provide much of its fascinating quality, but the
gaps in the tale could also be designed to make it easier for true believers to link
it to their own wider conclusions.

Another dreamy effect is the strange alien book Lazar says he saw at S-4. Its
pages were translucent, like a series of acetate layers, so that you could see into a
house, X-ray style, from shingles to framing to chimney inside. He was allowed to
read the book, which combined a history of the earth and a history of a planet in
the star system Reticulum 4, where the saucers originated. Human beings are
referred to as “containers”—for souls or for genes or whatever is unclear. (The
term “containers” caught the imagination of UFO buffs; the Heaven’s Gate cult
would use it in their teachings.) Some sixty-five “genetic interventions” beginning
in the epoch when men were still apes were described. “Intervention” seemed to
Lazar to mean manipulation of DNA, and appeared designed to make humans a
breeding species for the aliens—a kind of grafting stock for a race that had lost
its ability to reproduce.

The book serves as a means to introduce much more information than would
have come to Lazar’s attention directly, but it seems a clumsy plot device, worthy
of a computer adventure game or a wavy transition in a film from an opening
book to real action.

Unlike many UFO sources, Lazar had begun as a skeptic; he had gone on record
as deriding the youfers. A convincing detail is Lazar’s statement that when he

first caught sight of the saucers, he thought they were terrestrial military craft.
“Well, there’s the explanation for UFOs,” he thought. We must have made them.
But when he learned they were not from Earth, he had a strange reaction. That
night, he said, he lay in bed, giggling, unable to sleep. Lazar had a charming
reluctance to overstate. “I hate to mention this,” he’d begin. “I don’t want to get
too deeply into that,” he would say in answer to a question, or “I don’t like to
talk about this.” He was almost coyly casual about his one sighting of an actual
alien. It could have been a mannequin, he says, or a mock-up. “It could have
been a million things.”

But Lazar’s story has the useful feature, too, of suggesting associations with the
rest of the Lore, like the round tabs of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The very vagueness
and limits of his knowledge inspires listeners to make their own links. He’s not
sure where the saucers he saw came from—could it have been Roswell, or the
storage site at Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat? He hears rumors of a shoot-out with
aliens—perhaps it was at S-4, or Area 51, or at Dulce, as the Lore tends to have
it?

A recurrent theme in Lazar’s story was his feeling that his employers at S-4 were
“trying to make him disappear” by removing records. This happened even before
he left the job. He claimed it was this sense that he was being made invisible that
led him to go public. He couldn’t find records of his own life, he said. “They’re
trying to make me look nonexistent,” or, in an oddly dislocated locution, he felt
“that someone was going to disappear.”

Worse, he was forgetting things. Had they done something to his mind? Had he
been given something to drink, as the Lore held they often did to interlopers (it
was supposed to smell like Pine-Sol)?

His memories were disappearing, too. By September 1990 he was complaining
he had forgotten the name of the two modes of travel of the saucers—one low
speed, the other high, intergalactic speed—and resorted to calling them alpha
and beta. Nor could he any longer remember an important coefficient for one of
the processes or certain frequencies of the gravity wave and other details he was
convinced he had once known. “I’ve developed a mental block,” he said. “It
really bugs me.” He went to a hypnotherapist to help him remember, but it was
not very successful.

Lear noticed that Lazar had begun to forget things. “Don’t you remember that
night you came over to my house all excited?” Lear asked him. Lazar had
completely forgotten.

One night in December 1988, or January 1989, Lear recalls, Lazar came by his
house in a state of high excitement. It was bitter cold, “but we talked outside
because it made him more comfortable. He was in shirtsleeves. He told me about
seeing the alien. He was very excited. Now, he can’t remember it.”

“I saw a disc,” Lear says Lazar told him.

“Ours or theirs?”

“Theirs. I just got back from the test site.”

“Oh my God. What are you doing here? You should continue to work up there
for a while. Don’t jeopardize your security clearance.”

“But, John,” Lazar replied, “you’ve taken so much flak about this stuff that I’m
going to tell you.”

“And for the next three hours and forty-seven minutes he proceeded to tell me
all of it. He told me we did have secret bases on the moon and Mars. He told me
things, some of which were so unbelievable [that] had I not known Bob I would
have been very suspicious.”

Once Lazar was asked, “Don’t you feel—no pun intended—alienated? In fact
aren’t you kind of connected with them, and removed from the rest of society
that doesn’t accept that?”

“Absolutely,” he answered. “I feel like I really know what’s going on, and
everyone’s an idiot. I really feel that way. Alienated is the perfect word for it.” He
was, you might say, a classically alienated type. But the S-4 experience had given
order to his life.

The saucers, he said, “made it all make sense. It’s the only thing that makes
sense. It takes a lot of the confusion out of things. A lot more knits together ...”

Still, as PsychoSpy had urged in his essay “Lazar as Fictional Character,”
consider Lazar’s story as story. He implies that if Lazar did not exist, the youfers
would find it necessary to invent him. That they may have invented him, or that
the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) or some other government
organization may have invented him, or that he invented himself—all are
possibilities that hang in the air like the lights over Dreamland. But who would
invent Lazar, and why? Was he a government disinformation agent? Why? As
cover for secret programs? To make sure that people believe the lights they see
moving above the Jumbled Hills are flying saucers instead of manned terrestrial
aircraft or, more likely, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? The Stealth fighter
was revealed in the autumn of 1988 just as Lazar went to work at S-4. Was there
a connection? (Indeed, the first images of the Stealth fighter, heavily airbrushed,
were released about the time Lazar surfaced.) But Lazar’s story would only draw
more curious viewers to the perimeter, where they might see real aircraft while
looking for Lazar’s saucers.

Did Lazar create Lazar? For money or for fame? There was a film deal with
New Line Pictures, although the amount of Lazar’s income from the rights was
unclear. The film languished in production. Originally due in 1994, it went
through many scripts and suffered from troubles at New Line. He had been paid

to serve as consultant for a plastic kit of the saucer “Sport Model” for the Testor
company. Packed with each kit was a poster, just as Lazar had described, bearing
the words “They’re here!” Was his goal to become a legend in his own mind, to
feel comfortable and real there in front of the blackboard in the pose of Teller or
Oppenheimer, to become at last a real authority?

Lazar’s story hovers about the Ridge. Chewed over, tugged at, poked, prodded,
and twisted, it quickly became a modern legend, obsessing viewers who came to
the Black Mailbox to see if they could see Lazar’s saucers.

4. Aurora

It was cold, Chuck Clark told me, sitting across the table at the Little A“Le”Inn,
twenty below, when he saw the Aurora. “But I served in Korea where it was
colder than that all the time. I’d been waiting for hours and only saw it for a few
seconds, silhouetted against the light when they pulled the hangar door open. It
rolled out and the door closed and it took off.” What shape was it? He was vague.
“But many times I’ve seen the blue flame of the methane engines on the test
stand behind the hangar”—the big hangar, the one the youfers called Hangar 18.
“It exists.”

Aurora, the most mythical of the planes above Dreamland, was believed to be
the successor to the Blackbirds, a mother-daughter ship arrangement, flying at
Mach 8, perhaps the craft that leaves the little putt-putt doughnut-on-a-rope
contrail.

In the 1890s, strange reports began to surface of mysterious airships drifting over
the Midwest and West. They were heard in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Harrisburg,
Arkansas, but Texas had the largest number of reports. Some of the crews talked
to people on the ground. One group asked for food. Another was said to have
sung “Nearer My God to Thee.” There was even a cattle mutilation report: A steer
had been lassoed, pulled into the airship, roasted, and eaten, with only the skin
and bones dropped back overboard.

The reports resembled those of the post-World War II flying-saucer era, except
that the speeds cited were tens or hundreds of miles per hour, rather than
hundreds or thousands, and the materials described were no more exotic than
aluminum.

The mid-1890s were a period of economic depression, political instability, and
general cultural unease. The first dirigibles—“airships”—had flown in Europe,
and Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution flew his crude aircraft from a
houseboat on the Potomac River in May 1896 and garnered widespread publicity.
The invention of the airplane seemed imminent.

The height of the craze came in April 1897. One report, in the Dallas Morning
Times, on April 19, came from the small town of Aurora, Texas. Aurora was then
a dusty little town, and having an airship sighting meant being up to date; an
account of another sighting in Denton, Texas, had suggested to the local
newspaper editor proof that Denton “was not behind” other towns. The Morning
Times told of a craft crashing into a windmill, of wreckage and a pilot’s log. There
was speculation that it was from Mars and even word that one of the crewmen
was killed in the crash and buried in Aurora.

The Dallas newspaper’s report made startling claims:

About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the
sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the
country. It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than before.
Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of
only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth. It
sailed over the public square and when it reached the north part of town [it]
collided with the tower of judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a
terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the
windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden. The pilot of
the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains
are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he
was not an inhabitant of this world.

Mr. T. J. Weems, the U.S. [Army] Signal Service officer at this place and an
authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he [the pilot] was a native
of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person—evidently the records of his
travels—are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and cannot be
deciphered. This ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its
construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling
somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several
tons. The town today is full of people who are viewing the wreckage and
gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will
take place at noon tomorrow.

Signed: E. E. Haydon.

No one at the Morning News picked up on the dispatch’s dramatic suggestions.
None of the strange metal ever showed up; the “papers” were not shown. And no
one inquired about the pilot’s grave. But the account was a foreshadowing of a
Roswell-style crash—the hieroglyphics, the widely scattered debris, the strange
materials, the recovered body, were all standard elements of twentieth-century
saucer crashes.

The story was not taken up again until 1967, in an account in a British UFO
publication by Jacques Vallee and Donald B. Hanlon called “Airships over Texas.”
After that story appeared, a UFO investigator visited Aurora. He found that the
Proctor farm where the crash had been reported was now a gas station run by a
man named Brawley Oates. Oates referred the investigator to another man, Oscar
Lowry, who had been eleven at the time of the incident.

Lowry and other surviving witnesses strongly suggested that the whole thing
had been a hoax. There was no Army Signal officer in the town—T. J. Weems
was the town blacksmith. Proctor’s farm didn’t even have a windmill.

E. E. Haydon, the stringer for the Dallas paper who wrote the story, was the
local cotton buyer. He had noted the decline of Aurora since a new railroad had

bypassed the town. The story was almost certainly a prank, in the spirit of
Rachel’s efforts to cash in on local UFOs.

In 1973, with the country sitting through the Watergate hearings and, perhaps
not incidentally, finding itself in the grip of one of its periodic waves of UFO
sightings, reporters from U.P.I. picked up on the old Aurora tale. A report that
appeared in many newspapers on May 24, 1973, quoted Hayden Hewes, director
of an organization called the International UFO Bureau, who had gone to Aurora
to investigate. Hewes claimed to have discovered the spaceman’s grave and
threatened to go to court to have it opened. He found a strange rock marked with
an arrow and three circles in the cemetery and reported that the spaceman had
been buried under it.

Reuters and the Associated Press joined the chase. The A.P. reported that
samples of strange metal had been found near the gas station. When analyzed,
they turned out to be mundanely terrestrial pot metal. Reuters interviewed a
ninety-one-year-old woman who claimed to recall that the pilot had been buried
in the cemetery, which was run by the local Masonic order and an organization
called the Aurora Cemetery Association. But the association’s map of the
cemetery plots revealed no sign of the spaceman’s grave or of any unidentified
graves. The group blocked attempts to dig up the place, and on the night of June
14, 1973, the strange rock disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.

The name Aurora returned in the 1980s linked to the most mysterious of mystery
airplanes. What the Lazar story was for UFO watchers, Aurora was for black-
plane buffs. In the late eighties and early nineties, Aurora became the focus of
speculation among the watchers—the pinup goddess of the Interceptors. The
name evoked high-flying associations: Aurora, goddess of the dawn, or aurora
borealis, the northern lights that sometimes so enraptured pilots they would fly
toward them to their deaths.

The word Aurora entered the lore of black aircraft when it popped up in a P-1,
or procurement budget document, near line items for the U-2 and the SR-71, and
attached to the phrase “air-breathing reconnaissance.” Its inclusion appeared to
be a mistake, but the stealthies and Skunkers noticed it. And they noticed the
next year when the size of the requested appropriation for Aurora for fiscal 1987
rose from $8 million in fiscal 1986 to $2.3 billion. The next year the item
vanished. They assumed it was a successor to the Blackbird and the legendary U-
2. The Skunk Works must be at it again.

The first reports came in the aviation press. And in 1988 The New York Times
ran a story on the plane that claimed it could fly as fast as Mach 6.

In 1989 an oil-drilling engineer named Chris Gibson spotted what may have
been Aurora refueling with two F-llls. Gibson, perhaps a bit too conveniently,
skeptics noted, was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, trained in recognizing
aircraft. In August 1989, Gibson told me, he was working on a petroleum drilling

rig called the Galveston Key in the Indefatigable oil field in the North Sea. He
was below decks when his coworker Graeme Winton came down and told him to
hurry above.

“Have a look at this,” Winton said, pointing out a group of planes flying
overhead: a large one, two smaller ones, and a strange triangular one.

After a while, Gibson explained to Winton, aircraft observers count on an
almost subliminal feel for the shape or gestalt of an aircraft, called the “sit,”
similar to what bird-watchers refer to as “jizz.” But no “sit” seemed right for the
triangle.

“The big one is a KC-135 Stra to tanker,” he told Winton. “The two on the left
are F-llls, and I don’t know what the fourth is.”

“I thought you were an expert,” Winton commented.

1 am.

“Some expert.”

At first Gibson thought the triangle might be another F-lll, but there were no
gaps in its wings and it was too long. The F-117 had just been made public, but
the triangle was too big for one of those. Nor was it a French Mirage IV fighter.
Gibson was stumped.

Back in his quarters, Gibson consulted the aircraft recognition manual that he
considered the best in the world: the Flykendingsbog, published by the Danish
civilian spotter group, the Luftmelderkorpset. But no plane in the book looked
anything like what he had seen.

Gibson then made a drawing of the triangular craft and sent it to several
aviation journalists, including the highly respected Bill Sweetman, who much
later presented the sighting, in Jane’s, the aviation publication, in December
1992, as one of the linchpins of a pro-Aurora argument. The plane, Sweetman
concluded, could fly at Mach 8, reaching anywhere on Earth within three hours.
It had first taken to the skies, he believed, in 1985, at Groom Lake, and likely
flew in and out of Machrihanish, the Scottish special forces base that had also
hosted the SR-71.

In 1990, after a ceremonial flyover above the Lockheed Skunk Works, which
the ailing genius Kelly Johnson viewed from his car, the SR-71 was retired,
lending strength to the Aurora stories. The Air Force or CIA wouldn’t have retired
the Blackbird, the reasoning went, if they didn’t have something else ready to
replace it. Why had the Air Force not fought harder to keep the SR-71?

Complex politics swirled about the SR-71. While the Blackbird lacked powerful
patrons within the Pentagon, its legend attracted many in Congress, which
several times had restored the Blackbird to the budget after the Air Force had
removed it. Aurora seemed the logical next project for the Skunk Works, a plane

that flew higher and faster than any then known, kept under wraps as long as
possible.

Aurora, the story soon came to include, was powered by methane, a technology
involving cryogenics, which the Skunk Works had explored as early as 1957. At
that time, it had nearly built the hydrogen-powered CL-400 or Suntan, but Skunk
Works boss Kelly Johnson killed the project at the last minute when he realized
the prohibitive cost of setting up an infrastructure for handling liquid hydrogen
at bases around the world and refueling in flight.

Liquid methane might work better. It might power an Aurora that girdled the
globe, a recon plane, but one that might also be able to drop a wicked heavy
projectile on a hardened command post with an uppity dictator inside it. Johnson
had advocated such a system years ago, using the SR-71. Dropped while flying at
such speeds, a heavy hardened-steel projectile is like an A-bomb—each thousand
miles of velocity is worth a pound of TNT.

In 1991 a series of “skyquakes,” as the local media liked to call them, long
rumbling sounds, rolled over Los Angeles. To seismologist Jim Mori, these
suggested the sonic booms of a craft returning from an altitude of, say, 100,000
feet, or even from space, descending over L.A. to land in Dreamland.

Sightings around the same time in Palmdale and the Antelope Valley
proliferated. Many of the reports depicted a long triangular craft, with wings
swept back about 70 degrees. Others suggested an XB-70-like craft, or a “mother
ship” carrying a smaller “daughter” craft on its back.

A TV writer named Glenn Emery reported a sighting in May 1992 near Atlanta,
hardly black-plane country. In August 1992 more reports surfaced of delta
shapes. The sound described in several reports, including one near Mojave,
California, was a “low-pitched rumble.” That month, a viewer near Helendale,
California, location of Lockheed’s radar cross-section (RCS) test facility, described
a craft crossing the road at an altitude of less than two hundred feet. It may have
landed at Helendale, the reports said, because the Groom and Nellis areas were
covered with severe thunderstorms.

There were reports of shrouded shapes being loaded onto cargo planes at the
Skunk Works in Burbank and of airliners in near misses with strange craft. Airline
pilots reported several near misses with triangular craft. 1

In August 1992, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
published their Mystery Aircraft report, which took at best an agnostic view. The
study pointed out the epistemological problems: There were too many sightings,
too much information, too many possible planes—and yet not enough evidence.
And despite the budget document listings, the FAS report pointed out, no money
had ever actually been appropriated for the Aurora item before it was removed.

As usual, the signal-to-noise ratio was invoked. Based on the report, The New

York Times came out with a story in January 1993 that denied Aurora’s existence.
But Aurora flew on. At least on aviation and popular science magazine covers, it
flew with all the fidelity skilled airbrush and gouache could convey. The
paintings and models made the near mythical craft seem as real as any Piper Cub
at the local landing strip—or, rather, more real. Amphibian, feline, raylike
shapes, delicately modeled, seen against orange sunsets and blue depths of sky—
if they did not exist they should have.

In 1993 the Testor company released a model John Andrews had designed. It
adopted the theory that Aurora was a “mother ship” with a smaller vehicle on its
back. The mother ship bore the name “SR-75 Penetrator,” and on its back rode
the “XR-7 Thunderdart.” The Thunderdart was supposed to fly at Mach 7 and
boasted the pulse detonation wave engines that emitted the already famed
doughnut-on-a-rope contrail.

The model made the idea of Aurora inescapable. Such craft should exist
whether it did or not. It was hard not to believe in a craft that someone had so
carefully and thoroughly imagined, designed parts of, and written instructions for
that that read like this: “Podded Engines. Assembly. 1. Cement centerbody vane,
71 G, to centerbody wall and vane, 72 G. Now cement the vane/wall unit into
the center spike, 73 G. Now cement the centerbody flow ring, 74 G, to the
centerbody.”

Jim Goodall, aviation journalist and black-plane expert, was convinced.
Goodall believed that about $15 billion had been spent on the thing, that it was
there to sniff out Third World nukes, a joint project of the United States and the
former Soviet Union.

Even Bob Lazar claimed to have seen what he thought was Aurora, inside
Dreamland.

Speculation over Aurora brought all sorts of proposed hypersonic craft designs
out of the closet as stealthies rushed to find corroboration for a real plane. These
were dream wings, paper airplanes. Aircraft companies and engineers are
constantly dreaming up possible airplanes. Sometimes they are simply fantasies,
aeronautical engineers’ wet dreams, and sometimes they are teasers, like concept
vehicles shown at car shows, intended to whet the public’s appetite and that of
the generals in the Pentagon.

By the fall of 1993, Bill Sweetman had written a book on Aurora, consisting
mostly of citations of these earlier hypersonic aircraft proposals, going back to
the early supersonic X planes. There were dozens of them, pictured with slick
contractor illustrations of lifting bodies and wave-riders (triangular aircraft that
surf on the shock wave produced when they push beyond the speed of sound),
many of them intended to be launched from the back of another aircraft. Also
included was Lockheed’s hypersonic glide vehicle, which was designed to reach
Mach 18.

One version of the Aurora story held that work began in 1983 to create a
successor to the SR-71. It was called Q, Aerotech News reported, from “quantum
leap” in technology, but it had become too expensive and was canceled. To Jim
Goodall, cost was no problem. The airplane would cost, say, a billion dollars a
year. What airplane didn’t cost that much? he argued. The number was easy. And
it was easy to hide that much.

Black-budget watcher Paul McGinnis, known as Trader, at first believed that
Aurora was a program code-named Senior Citizen. But he tracked that one down
and concluded it was a stealthy transport—a short-takeoff-and-landing craft for
sneaking troops behind enemy lines. Later, the program he finally decided was
the real Aurora was one he knew only by the budget-line code number
0603223F.

In another theory, Aurora was not hidden at all, but was the shadow of Ronald
Reagan’s “Orient Express,” a supersonic dream plane that would fly from New
York to Tokyo in a couple of hours. No one could figure out how this projected
passenger craft, formally called the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), made any
economic sense. John Pike speculated that Aurora might be hiding in plain sight
as the NASP—“a purloined letter” of an airplane, Pike called it. Sweetman
noticed, too, that the NASP planners were confidently counting on building the
Orient Express from a titanium alloy that had never been used before—at least in
any publicly known aircraft.

Was it conceivable that Aurora was not a manned airplane, but a robotic one,
an unmanned aerial vehicle, rumored to be called Q or Tier III? Perhaps the
romance of the name was elusive as well: The “Glossary of Aerospace Terms and
Abbreviations,” a supplement to the aerospace magazine Air International,
claimed that Aurora was an acronym for “Automatic Retrieval Of Remotely-
piloted Aircraft.”

One theory held that the plane had been canceled in 1986 because it was too
expensive or didn’t work. Another said it had suffered catastrophic failure on the
eve of the Gulf War. Yet another reported that it had been pushed ahead because
of the Air Force’s desperation for a space plane in the wake of the Challenger
disaster in January 1986 and the failure of two Titan booster rockets carrying spy
satellites. But the dates did not jibe with the budget document. The B-2 had been
given the go-ahead in 1981, and did not fly until 1989. How long would it take
even the Skunk Works to bring an Aurora to fruition?

Supporting the “it was a bust” theory was a report in July 1994 by the Senate
Appropriations Committee stating that “The system which some hoped would be
developed and procured as a follow-on to the SR-71 has not materialized.”

The myth of the airplane came to resemble its possible namesake, the aurora
borealis. It suggested a shimmery, elusive veil of rumint, charging the
imaginations and dreams of the Interceptors and stealth watchers.

After Sweetman’s report in Jane’s, which The Wall Street Journal and The
Washington Post picked up, the government responded. Donald Rice, Secretary of
the Air Force, issued a categorical denial in a letter to the Post in December 1992.

“Let me reiterate what I have said publicly for months,” he wrote.

The Air Force has no such program either known as “Aurora” or by any other
name. And if such a program existed elsewhere, I’d know about it—and I don’t.
Furthermore, the Air Force has neither created nor released cover stories to
protect any program like “Aurora.” I can’t be more unambiguous than that.
When the latest spate of “Aurora” stories appeared, I once again had my staff
look into each alleged “sighting” to see what could be fueling the fire. Some
reported “sightings” will probably never be explained simply because there
isn’t enough information to investigate. Other accounts, such as of sonic booms
over California, the near collision with a commercial airliner, and strange
shapes loaded into Air Force aircraft, are easily explained and we have done so
numerous times on the record. I have never hedged a denial over any issue
related to the so-called “Aurora.” The Air Force has no aircraft or aircraft
program remotely similar to the capabilities being attributed to the “Aurora.”
While I know this letter will not stop the speculation, I feel that I must set the
record straight.

The Air Force commissioned an independent testing lab to show that the
“skyquakes” in Los Angeles were nothing more than booms from offshore Navy
fighters. Yet whether it was due to Rice’s denial or the arrival of a new
administration, skepticism in the press began to grow.

In Amarillo, the arch-interceptor Steve Douglass had scanned a revealing
conversation from an Air Force aircraft phone. The transmission took place on
the “Mystic Star” network used by aircraft transporting heads of state and
military VIPs, including Air Force One. The transmission was made in the clear on
December 10, 1992, when a general placed a phone-patch from SAM (Special Air
Mission) 204 through Andrews AFB to “AF public relations.”

Aurora was discussed. The general quoted the article in The Washington Post as
well as the one in Jane’s. He said, “It’s almost laughable the number of hokey
inputs they had. It’s kind of similar to the UFO flap. We need to develop a release
in response to inquiries. The guts of this should be that we’ve looked at the
technical aspects of the sightings and what the logical answers for them are. You
can quote Dr. Mori and cite the Lincoln Lab physics and the FAA’s efforts to
debunk other incidents. Go through three or four of the sightings, take each one
on and conclude with a paragraph that says the fantasy of Aurora doesn’t exist.”

They went on to discuss the sighting in the North Sea from an oil drilling
platform. “Someone saw something accompanied by three F-llls. The secretary
wants us to say it was an F-117.”

To Steve, there was clearly a cover-up under way.

Aurora vanished from the next round of budget documents, and Ben Rich would
later report that Aurora was the code name for the funding of the B-2
competition between Lockheed and Northrop. Others in the industry made fun of
the legend. A stealth expert at Northrop once asked me, “Have you heard the
news about Aurora?” He waited the requisite two beats and then said, “It’s an
Oldsmobile.”

And true enough, Oldsmobile had come out with a dramatic-looking new car
named Aurora (the designer credited the F-15 as one inspiration for its shape)
that was supposed to help the company’s laggard sales. The ads for the
Oldsmobile even referred to the airplane: You can’t see the Air Force’s, they said,
but you can buy ours.

In 1985 a movie loosely based on the 1897 Aurora, Texas, airship story appeared.
It featured an elfin ET who wore jeweled, medieval clothing and piloted a
Victorian flying saucer amid sets left over from a cheap Western. The spaceship,
its rivets exposed like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, suggested an 1890s and not a
1980s version of high-tech.

“It was a squatty shape with wings,” says the movie’s colorful old coot, who
makes patent elixir, “but the strangest thing was the little feller driving it.”

The film spins out the original story: The landing is real, and a newspaper
editor capitalizes on it to save her ailing publication and bring the town fame.

At the time of the great airship wave, William Randolph Hearst denounced the
reports of the sightings in the same tones that future newspaper editors would
use for castigating tabloid newspapers. In a San Francisco Examiner editorial of
December 5, 1896, Hearst intoned: “Fake journalism has a good deal to answer
for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent
attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with
airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure
myth.” It was a shrill tone to take for a man who, two years later, would be
largely credited with puffing up tensions in Cuba that propelled the United States
into the Spanish-American War.

Was the latter-day Aurora a headline without a war? Or could Aurora have been
as mythical as the long-ago airships over Aurora, Texas? A craft full of hot air, a
shape compounded of disinformation?

Significantly, Aurora as an imaginary aircraft could have had some of the
effects of an actual plane. It could, for example, have made potential enemies
aware that they could be observed at any moment. Did whoever named the craft
Aurora know about the Texas town and its tale? Was this an inside joke,
deliberate political disinformation?

By the mid-nineties a flock of new high-speed aircraft came into the open. One
was called LoFlyte, a so-called waverider. And when Lockheed Martin received a

contract to build the X-33, the hypersonic suborbital aircraft, Skunkers became
suspicious. The promised delivery date and comparatively low bid suggested that
Lockheed had technology already available—possibly from Aurora—to give it a
head start. Was the X-33 simply the “white” version of Aurora?

If there was no Aurora, or nothing like it, why were buildings going up so fast
at Area 51? Why were Wall Street analysts pointing to large, mysterious sources
of income in Lockheed’s annual reports? Why were Lockheed’s parking lots full?
What was it that needed a six-mile runway across Groom Lake, in Dreamland?
Questions like these, as much as the tales of Lazar’s saucers, drew the curious in
greater and greater numbers to the perimeter of Area 51.

5. Maps

The Little A“Le”Inn did a good business in maps—bought from the government
and significantly marked up. Naturally they did not show the base over the
Ridge.

The fascination Dreamland radiated began with the fact that for years it did
not officially exist. A map I bought at the Bureau of Land Management office in
Las Vegas did not show it. The 1:100,000 metric scale, 30 x 60 minute map from
1985 claimed to display “highways, roads and other man-made structures” but
bore no signs of runways, hangars, or the buildings that housed hundreds of
workers and engineers at the base. But why should Dreamland be on the map? It
was after all not a real but an imagined place, a virtual landscape, a “notional”
land, and its map was to be found drawn not on the ground but on the mind.

Groom Lake and Dreamland were part of a wider map of secret facilities,
mystery spots that represent a significant portion of tax dollars at work: air bases
and test sites, controlled airspaces and anonymous buildings housing research
facilities. It belongs to the same cultural landscape as the nuclear labs in Los
Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, which
controls spy satellites, the CIA training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and the
National Reconnaissance Office’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C.—the
“stealth building” kept secret from Congress even while under construction.
Many of these facilities make up the Southwest Test and Training Range
Complex, which runs from White Sands and Fort Huachuca in the south to the
Utah Test and Training Range in the north. Included are the Air Force Flight Test
Center at Edwards, the best known, most open of the areas, even including the
closed-off “North Base,” and China Lake, the Navy’s radar and electronic test site
to the north and east of Edwards. There is a difference, though: All these other
facilities have long been acknowledged.

Dreamland had no edges—the Minister’s phrase kept coming back to me. But it
had ties and umbilicals to Edwards, to the contractors in Las Vegas, to the Air
Force labs at Wright Patterson in Dayton. The ties reached all the way back to the
Pentagon, whose shape has transformed from that of an old star-shaped fort into
an icon of the new military-industrial complex. I thought of the whole network of
facilities that were kin to Dreamland as a mysterious distant land: Pentagonia,
marked with its own patterns, somehow similar to the Dreamings of the
aboriginal peoples of Australia; or as an expanding metropolis, a ghost metro
area with its own suburbs, industrial parks, malls.

Dreamland was born of the culture of secrecy; its owners—the Department of

Energy and before that the Atomic Energy Commission, on the one hand, and the
Air Force on the other—sat at the junction of the twin ideologies of nuclear
power and airpower. This invisible culture cast a great shadow, which was the
culture of ufology—the antimatter of the matter.

I tried to create a mind-map of Dreamland, based on certain marketing
presentations I had seen. A car maker, for instance, might mind-map the image of
a vehicle. One axis—latitude—would mark “sporty” versus “practical” while
another—longitude—might distinguish a range of impressions from “luxury” to
“basic transportation.” It seemed to me you could mind-map the cultures of the
world of nukes and the world of airpower in a way that could neatly correspond
with the overlaps of the test site and the Nellis range on the physical map.

In time I tried to map, too, the mind-sets of those on the Ridge: “Believe secret
airplanes are being tested” on a line with “Believe alien technology is being
tested.” The youfers and the Interceptors would be at either pole. In the middle
were a surprising number of people who bought into both—and even more who
were simply tempted to believe.

The other axis would distinguish “those who think it ought to remain secret”
from “those who want it opened as much as possible.” Oddly enough, by the mid¬
nineties I was hearing the youfers cluster at the first end of the axis, with Huff
and Lear saying they now thought it should all remain closed, the whole story
kept down because people weren’t ready, couldn’t deal with it.

The closer you got, the harder it was to see. It became a cliche that everyone
saw from the Ridge what they wanted to see: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t
believed it.” To see the whole thing you had to step away, and look from many
perspectives, through many eyes.

Still, I studied the mint and mocha shades of the Coast and Geodetic Survey
maps and looked at the official tourist map of Nevada, with its upbeat
registration of ghost towns. I put my hands on maps from the Defense Mapping
Agency as well as the Federal Aviation Administration aerial charts with their
landscape of ochers and burnt yellow hatched with the purple edges of restricted
military operations areas like blackberry juice stains or old, fading bruises. The
signal stations—VORs—for aviation guidance were rendered as gear-toothed
compass wheels.

One afternoon I stopped by the state historical museum in Las Vegas. There was a
display on the Shoshone tribes who originally lived in the area. Beside a
panoramic photograph of Tonopah, the town north of Dreamland proper, in the
heyday of the silver boom—a collection of mine tailings and shacks and a hotel
bearing a Bull Durham ad—hung a map promoting the Tonopah and Tidewater
railroad, the brainchild of Francis “Borax” Smith. Smith replaced the famed
twenty-mule teams hauling borax from the mines around Trona with trains, and
they still ran. In Mojave I had many times heard the Trona train rumbling

through in the middle of the night, a seemingly endless succession of low dark
ore cars coming in from the northeast.

The landscape of nearly a hundred years ago looked more inhabited and
detailed, packed with mines and claims and crisscrossing railroads. In the map’s
legend, the twin T’s of the railroad name were cleverly eye-punned into twin T-
rails. I was shocked to see no boundaries across the map—no dotted perimeters,
no shaded restricted areas, no overlapping colors—so used had I become to maps
of restricted spaces.

I looked at every map I could find. I even “flew” over the lake and the
mountains on a CD-ROM map that could show any part of the landscape of the
country in three dimensions. I flew over the mountains from the area of the Black
Mailbox, moved up the Groom Road, then over the hills, zooming along the
runway and past the hangars, neither of which were marked, and turning to cross
over Bald Mountain with a sickening plunge like a roller coaster’s. I turned on the
terrain-following feature and, nosing down, saw it all dissolve as proximity
overwhelmed the program’s resolution and individual pixels grew into colored
angular shapes, into facets like those of a stealth plane. Finally, the screen turned
as blank as the maps were before the miners and military arrived.

What the maps did show was that Dreamland is a place where things overlap.
Mojave Desert meets Great Basin and quartzite overshoots Cambrian limestone;
the range of the ancient Anasazi fades into and over that of the Fremont culture,
where Nevada Test Site overlaps the Nellis Air Force gunnery and bombing range
—which in turn are overlapped by the National Desert Wildlife Range, created in
1936 by FDR to save the bighorn sheep.

The signs warning of use of deadly force on Dreamland’s perimeter refer to the
USAF/DOE liaison office in Las Vegas, for which they provide a post box number.
By the best accounts, the Air Force and Department of Energy jointly administer
the area, under a “Memo of Understanding.”

The Atomic Energy Commission took control of the area just to the south and
west of the dry lake in 1950. Airspace here was limited beginning in 1955, and
the area formally shifted from the public lands of the Nellis range to the control
of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Nellis Air Force Base had greater needs, too, and by 1959 all the grazing and
most of the mineral rights within the range were purchased by the Air Force.

In 1956, 369,280 acres of the Nellis range to the northwest of the lake were
lent to the AEC as the Tonopah Test Range for ballistic missiles. In 1958 Public
Land Order 1662, signed by one Roger Ernst, assistant secretary of the interior,
withdrew from the public lands 38,400 acres (60 square miles) for use “by the
Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the Nevada Test Site.” The area
was the first formal survey of the six-by-ten-mile “box” around the base.

On August 11, 1961, with tensions rising in Berlin and bad news from Laos, the
FAA established a new restricted airspace, designated R-4808 and covering the
test site and Groom Lake. On thousands of bulletin boards in large airports and
tiny control towers across the country, a NOTAM—“Notice to Airmen”—apprised
pilots of the new boundary. In January 1962, the restricted airspace was
expanded to 22 by 20 nautical miles in response to a request by the Air Force
citing “an immediate and urgent need due to a classified project.” By the early
sixties, military maps began to show the air controllers’ name for new restricted
airspace over and around the base. Bordering airspaces known as Coyote,
Caliente, and Alamo was “Dreamland.”

Starting about 1978, “in the interest of public safety and national defense,” the
Air Force began—and here the authors of the 1985 Environmental Impact
Statement for the Area 51 region become gloriously politic and delicate
—“actively discouraging, and at times preventing, public or private entry to the
Groom Mountain Range.” The government also put up fences on the east side of
the range.

The next seizure, under Public Law 98-485, in October 1984, included Bald
Mountain, the nine-thousand-foot former volcano. In a letter dated July 6, 1984,
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force James Boatright assured rancher
Steve Medlin, the owner of the Black Mailbox, of his continuing water and
grazing rights. These are measured out by the BLM in Animal Unit Months
(AUMs). The Bald Mountain Allotment contains some 5,811 AUMs, which
translates to 480 head of cattle and five horses. They assured the Sheahans, the
owners of the site, of continued access to Groom Mine. But the Sheahans,
heading there one day, found the way blocked by blue-bereted Air Force police.

Dreamland and the adjoining nuclear test site had become a de facto nature
preserve. Animals could move back and forth between the two in a way humans
could not. In the spring of 1985, when environmentalists visited the area to
support the Air Force’s effort to withdraw from public use additional land around
Groom Lake, they found that wildlife was flourishing. Jackrabbit and cottontail
were abundant, as were coyotes, mule deer, badger, and kit foxes. Two mountain
lions were recorded. The chukar partridge had been growing in numbers.

The area is home to six kinds of rattlesnakes, the ferruginous hawk, Swainson’s
hawk, mountain plover, western snowy plover, and long-billed curlew, as well as
four species of bats, ranging from the little brown myotis to Townsend’s big-
eared. Naturalists defined several plant and animal communities in the area,
ranging from saltbush to mixed Mojave, blackbrush/sagebrush to pinyon/juniper
to mountain mahogany. There is a tiny spot of white fir at the top of Bald
Mountain, the Air Force-commissioned report noted; soon it would be
interrupted by a new high-tech emplacement of antennas and helipad. Thanks to
the land closures, the law required archaeological investigation, which showed
the area dotted with petroglyph sites, even a well-preserved nineteenth-century

wooden wickiup.

Because the military had to be sure no endangered species were affected,
Dreamland became one of the most carefully documented areas in the United
States.

It makes me feel good about my country that tanks and nuclear tests are
dependent on the cooperation of desert species. At Fort Irwin, California, to the
west of Dreamland, military maneuvers are required to stop if soldiers encounter
the endangered desert tortoise.

Both the Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site must have their withdrawal
from the public lands regularly renewed, which resulted in an environmental
impact statement prepared in 1995-96 for the whole test site. It ran to five fat
purple spiral-bound volumes.

Once, the map was blank. Once, the place was real. “One of the most desolate
regions upon the face of the earth,” First Lt. George Montague Wheeler called it
after leading Army Corps of Engineers expeditions through the area in 1869 and
again in 1871. It was tough territory, and Wheeler reminded readers of his report
that his expedition took place “amid the scenes of disaster of those early emigrant
trains who are accredited with having perished in ‘death valley.’ ” He was
referring to notorious reports that in 1849 part of the Death Valley Party en route
from Utah to California decided to take a shortcut, and camped near Groom and
Papoose lakes. Only the intervention of the friendly Paiutes saved them from
dying of thirst and starvation.

Unlike earlier expeditions dedicated to science, such as Clarence King’s
landmark exploration of the 40th parallel a few years earlier, Wheeler’s mandate
was “reconnaissance”: to map the area, survey minerals and mines, and help
guide “the selection of such sites as may be of use for future military operations
and occupation”—a neat foreshadowing of the later uses of the land.

On his first foray, in 1869, Wheeler and party camped at a place he called
Summit Springs, between Pahranagat and the Jumbled Hills, not far from the
heights from which the Interceptors would later survey Dreamland. In 1871, on
his second expedition, escorted by a detachment of the Third U.S. Cavalry,
Wheeler encountered the Paiutes, whom he described as “raising corn, melons
and squashes” and harvesting wild grapes. Of this people, who had rescued the
California-bound travelers, he added, “Virtue is almost unknown among them
and syphilitic diseases very common.”

Wheeler’s photographer, called “the Shadowcatcher” by the Paiutes, was the
renowned Timothy O’Sullivan, who not only left us with the first, lasting images
of such wonders of the West as Canyon de Chelly but as one of Mathew Brady’s
photographers had recorded dead sharpshooters in Devil’s Den at Gettysburg.
O’Sullivan’s photographs of Wheeler’s party show men who look even harder

than those better-known Civil War veterans. Hard-bitten, resigned, they were as
used to fear in this landscape as in battle. Their faces are darkened by the sun
above full beards and long sleeves.

On July 23, 1871, Wheeler’s geologist, a friend of O’Sullivan’s named G. K.
Gilbert, visited Groom Mine, and the party’s report described it as “one vast
deposit of galena,” a low-grade ore, mostly lead containing some silver, zinc, and
copper. An advance party had been sent to the west, toward Death Valley proper,
but that very night their guide disappeared—apparently deserted them—and they
very nearly died. The men were down to their last mouthfuls of water before
coming on a green spot they immediately named Last Chance Springs. A second
guide vanished and Wheeler wrote, “His fate, so far, is uncertain; that of any one
to have followed him in the particular direction he was taking when last seen
would have been CERTAIN death.”

After leaving his campsite at Naquinta Springs, Wheeler headed west, trying to
link up with the side party. The hills gradually opened up a prospect of Death
Valley that, Wheeler wrote, “met our eyes in strange and gloomy vibrations
through the superheated atmosphere.”

The same sense of foreboding landscape—more desert hallucination and
nightmare of thirst than American dream—emerged in the maps Wheeler’s
expedition produced as well as in O’Sullivan’s photographs. Before Wheeler,
maps depicted the interior of Nevada as a great blank space, hostile, rough,
forbidding. His cartographer, Louis Nell, filled it with the caterpillared hatchings
of hills and lava flats, the warty peaks and scars of passes—a geological history of
calamitous events. Fuzzy hatchings—whisker lines—mark the dry lakes. “Groom
Mining District” and other mining districts appear as neat boxes overlaying the
scarred landscape. The Black Metal Mine a mile south of Groom is shown, along
with the road to Indian Springs, now closed off, and another back to the east and
Hiko. Like square bandages on a tortured face, the upright lines of the mining
districts—the only political markings on the map save roads and tiny towns—
reveal civilian settlement that is no more than stopgap.

Today the sense of foreboding, the terror, comes across as stark beauty.
Photography critics would later note that these government-financed
documentary photographs, with their deadpan alien landscapes, resembled those
taken by lunar or Mars landing probes.

Wheeler had noted that while there was wood and water in abundance, Groom
Mine was not being worked. In September 1872 claims were filed by J. B.
Osborne and partners in the White Lake and Conception Lode and British capital
was invested to begin production.

The area was not called Groom until the end of World War II, when a geologist
named Fred Humphrey surveyed it for the Nevada State Bureau of Mines.
Previously it had been called the Naquinta Mountains or Tequima Range.

Humphrey found the whole area “imperfectly mapped,” and took the range’s
name from the Groom Mine, after a man named Bob Groom, who was on his way
to Oregon when one day in 1864 he came across a promising chunk of ore.
Groom never got rich from the claim and never mined it commercially, but he
lent the mountains and the lake nearby his name.

Not until a family named Sheahan took ownership in the 1880s did any
successful production begin; the Sheahans would keep the mine open through
war and thin times, to the present day. Silver was the first goal of the miners, but
lead became the mine’s main product. More silver was found in the nearby
Pahranagat district, inspiring the 1866 Nevada legislature to create Lincoln
County. Silver had driven the creation of the state of Nevada and would fuel its
subsequent booms. At Dreamland, of course, the goal would be to find “silver
bullet” weapons.

Fred Humphrey’s photos from the fall of 1944 show a quiet desert landscape,
the lake smooth and empty except for shells from wartime gunnery practice.
Humphrey mapped the faults—the graben, in geological terms—that served to
concentrate lead and silver. His published report includes painstaking orange and
blue foldout maps of the rock formations, shale battling limestone, jagged and
zigzaggy as an abstract painting. Two huge masses of distinct rocks had pressed
together. The result was like Dreamland itself: Where the strata overlapped—on
the faults—substances became compressed and concentrated. To understand the
strange dark history of the place, I had to explore the cultures in which it was
born.

6. “The Great Atomic Power”

Like Paris with its arrondissements, or Chicago with its political wards, the
Nevada Test Site is divided into numbered areas. But the numbers seem scattered
at random on the map of the mostly rectilinear areas. From one perspective, the
outline of the test site looks like a squared-off bird, a canyon wren, say, with its
beak at the northwest formed by Pahute Mesa, Area 20, and its stubby tail, to the
southeast, by Area 23 and the site’s company town, Mercury.

When the grid of the numbered areas dropped like a net over the rough
geological and topographical charts in the 1950s, Groom Lake became Area 51,
unfolding like a wing to the northeast. Dreamland was not just an offshoot of the
NTS but, like Godzilla and a hundred other science-fiction monsters, the
incidental product of nuclear testing, a mutation of Cold War thinking.

I was trying to make sense of the map of the site, conscious that soon I would
be sitting in the most powerful seat of the century, the big Naugahyde chair in
the Command Post of the test site from which an entire nuclear arsenal had been
detonated.

I would circumnavigate the whole of the Nevada Test Site and the Nellis Range of
which Dreamland was the center or, as I often thought of it, the critical core of
the bomb. I stopped at Indian Springs, the little airfield from which B-29s and B-
50s had taken off to drop the first test bombs in the early fifties. I passed the
legal whorehouses of Nye County, lonely trailers surrounded by pickup trucks,
gas pumps, and red lights out by the highway—big red dome lights visible from a
couple of miles down the road, the sort you might see atop a fire engine. “It’s the
only place in the world where you can fill your tank, change your oil, and get a
blow job all in one stop,” Derek joked.

Derek was the man who guided me through the test site. He worked for the
Department of Energy and took people through the site for a living, spending
whole days driving across Jackass Flats and Yucca Lake and Paiute Mesa.

Derek and I drove up from Las Vegas in one of the earliest snowfalls on record.
Eighteen-wheelers had slid into the median and a pickup truck was turned over
not far from a billboard offering tax-free cigarettes on sale at the Indian
reservation. “I’ve never seen it like this,” Derek said as the snow swirled thicker.

We turned off at the entrance to the test site, rumbling across a cattle guard.
What we saw first was “the Pen”—the chain-link-fenced yard that had regularly
been used to hold anti-nuke protesters, women on one side of a divide, men on
the other.

The sign above the main gate that reads welcome to the Nevada test site and
environmental research park invariably elicits snickers. I clutched my map as Derek
drove. It marked the territories of the nuclear death’s-head, the varieties of
nuclear obsession and fantasy and fear. Here the bizarre nuclear ramjet engine
for aircraft had been constructed; here were conducted tests of weapons accidents
and waste spills, the ones code-named Broken Spear and Bent Arrow. Here
“Grable,” the nuclear cannon, was fired. JFK visited the nuclear rocket Nerva, on
which once rode our hope for trips to the planets. Surrounded by his entourage,
he stood in sunglasses, looking up at the tortuous pipes of the test stand. At the
top of the map was the amazingly named Climax Spent Fuel Facility; to the left,
and west, the Yucca Mountain project, for planned storage of nuclear wastes into
the next several millennia.

Derek, I learned, was a child of the Blitz. He had been taken from London to
the country when the Germans began the first exhibition of airpower as terror.
His father had been in North Africa with Monty, and during six-hour cease-fires
he and his fellows had played soccer with the Germans, then gone back to trying
to kill each other.

Derek flew helicopters in Vietnam. He had “taken two armor-piercing in the
stomach” and swore the Vietcong paid their troops a twenty-five-dollar bonus for
every chopper pilot they took out. Before he came to Las Vegas and the test site,
he had worked for the DOE in Colorado, and a discussion of Denver Bronco star
quarterback John Elway was one of the few things that brought a smile to
Derek’s face.

The base camp at Mercury provided an inventory of government architecture,
from Nissen huts to pastel cinder-block apartments. A sign in the cafeteria
advertised an upcoming bowling tournament.

The road through the site runs from the highway turnoff at Mercury and, if you
could cross the Ridge, on to S-4—Papoose Lake, putative site of the saucer base.
Along the road were old signs warning about security and safety, their stridency
muted by wind and sun, which had brought the grain of the plywood back up
through the paint.

At Frenchman Flat, to the south end of the site, I stood on ground zero—on
many ground zeroes, actually. Most of the first blasts were set off in the air or
from towers and balloons in Jackass Flats. But nothing now was hot; the
radiation had long since faded and in places some of the top layer of soil had
been removed.

We pulled up to a set of test structures constructed at Frenchman Flat for the
1957 explosion called Priscilla. It was a virtual sculpture garden of shapes: an
underground garage entrance, built to test garages as fallout shelters; concrete
dome shelters, spheres with just their bald tops protruding from the earth; the
remnants of a railroad bridge trestle and a safe contributed by the Mosler

company from whose concrete sides the rebar was pulled back like the bones of a
cooked trout; the twisted forms of airplane hangars, reddened with rust, like an
Anthony Caro sculpture executed in fast-rusting Cor-ten steel. A series of concrete
boxes used to test blast resistance and known as the motel or the sugar loaves
suggested a Donald Judd sculpture.

The artifacts of testing looked like art. But it also worked the other way: These
shapes had inspired Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and other ambitious
creators of sixties-era “earth art” to leave behind sculpture as monumental as the
Ozymandian works of ancient civilizations. In our own time, no one had come
closer to putting timeless marks on the face of the planet than the boys at the test
site.

Looking at the expressionism of twisted girder and the minimalism of repeated
cubes, I suddenly understood how much the reductivist endgame of modern art
had in common with the no-win endgame of nuclear warfare. Was anything more
abstract than mutual assured destruction? Was it an accident that the end of
modernism and the end of the Cold War came almost simultaneously?

We paused at the Sedan Crater, in Area 10, recently added to the National
Register of Historic Places.

It is 325 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide and was created by a hydrogen blast on
July 6, 1962, the part of Edward Teller’s Plowshare program aimed at devising
peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. A few tumbleweeds had gathered in its
bottom like dust bunnies in an ill-kept apartment. Say a Third World dictator
whose country owns a major canal balks at renewing the treaty lease. Well, Teller
figured, you just light up a few nukes and dig a new one in the country next
door.

Sedan lifted eleven million tons of earth into the air in a blossoming explosion
that took on the shape of a great shrub above the desert. It jolted the ground with
the force of an earthquake registering 4.7 on the Richter scale. Apollo astronauts
in training used the crater to simulate one on the moon.

We stopped by Doomtown, in Area 1, where a couple of houses still stood from
the 1955 Apple II blast: little bits of Levittown in the desert, stocked with
mannequins from the JCPenney department store and canned and frozen foods
flown in from Chicago the night before the blast.

I felt as if Derek were a real estate agent and I a prospective buyer, checking
out the dry, gray plywood floors. I stood in one of the living rooms for a while,
then walked around the place, as if considering the landscaping. I noticed that
the chimney had been twisted on its axis so that bricks protruded a couple of
inches.

To the north is another little village of test structures, called Japan Town,
where realistic Japanese buildings were exposed to fallout in order to compare

the results with the effects of the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From a long way off, behind the Control Point, I could see the Device Assembly
Facility, the DAF, which had been built for assembling nukes at a cost of $100
million just before testing stopped. The DAF looks like a huge, long bunker or a
giant surfacing submarine. Inside are special rooms whose roofs are slung on wire
cables so they will collapse and trap blast and radiation in case of an accidental
explosion. The DAF was surrounded by watchtowers, wired fences, video
cameras, and high-tech radar sensors on poles. It cried out to be included in a
movie and it occurred to me that we taxpayers ought to recover our expenditures
by renting it out to Hollywood.

We passed “News Nob,” where, by the early fifties, any reporter worth his
typewriter, any broadcaster worth his mike, had to see an A-bomb for himself.
Congressmen, aides, and top government officials were brought here as well, and
for the St. Pat’s blast of 1953 the revelry was at its peak. The officials of the test
site hosted a group of journalists who produced upbeat stories in publications
from The New York Times to National Geographic.

We dropped by Command Post One, the blockhouse control center. Out front
were guards in camou. They opened the doors and flipped on the lights for us. It
was cold and quiet inside. No explosions had been set off for a year and a half,
and the building had the slightly musty smell of a vacation house left closed and
vacant for a long time. Inside the control room the thick wooden tables and
consoles turned out to be Formica, and chipped at that. I sat at last in the chair
from which the big booms had been set off. It seemed cheap, the size pitifully
pompous, like the chair of a minor county functionary full of his own
importance.

Everything in the room felt years out of date, almost seedy, more like the
furnishings of a government health clinic than the powerful high-tech control
center seen in old newsreels. The telephones had Lucite cube buttons you
punched to choose a line. Next to one of the buttons I saw the designation
“dremland” (sic). It was a line used to coordinate test operations with the tower
at Groom. I surreptitiously jotted down the number and I imagined calling it from
all sorts of places around the world, staying in touch with the tower in
Dreamland.

We stopped for lunch back at Mercury. In the afternoon, we returned to the
distant northern part of the test site. Here, Derek said, coyotes and deer roamed.
They had lived so far from human contact for so long they would often come
right up to you. “They have no fear at all,” he said. “It’s as if time had stopped.”
The talk turned to the other side of the Ridge, and the parts of the site we could
not visit. “Area 51?” Derek said. “I’m probably the only one out here who knows
what they are really doing over there.”

Derek looked at me, gauging my reaction. I didn’t dare to ask: “So what is it
then?” Because the answer would be either the serious “Well, of course I can’t tell
you” or the facetious, cliched joke: “Well, I could tell you but then I would have
to kill you.”

I looked over toward Gate 700, and it occurred to me that this might be the
closest I would get to the heart of Dreamland, Groom Lake, and certainly, in
physical distance, to its mysterious sibling, Papoose Lake.

I just let the question, as Henry James would say, “hang in the air.”

A few days later I met one of the men who had helped build the road I saw
running off through Gate 700, connecting the NTS to Dreamland. At noon one
hot day I drove through a quiet suburb of Las Vegas. It was empty and silent,
neat little houses on neat little lots. Modified ranch with a slight Mexican accent.
Stucco. Lots of ironwork. Pastels. Neatly clipped lawns.

Joe Bacco was sitting on his porch. He had worked for years as a maintenance
man, fixing roads and other facilities at the nuclear test site and in Area 51. He
wore on his identification the number “8,” which allowed him to cross the border
into Area 51. We talked in the dining room, under the eyes of a Madonna on the
wall.

I met Bacco at a hearing on the future of the test site. After the high-pitched
Greenpeacers and the Shoshone nation reps and the man who said he had worked
with plutonium daily with no ill effects had spoken, Bacco got his turn.

Joe Bacco sweats constantly now. There is a perpetual thin sheen over his
body, as if he were in a New Orleans August instead of the dry Nevada desert.
His eyes, always partly closed, as if swollen, glisten like his body. Bacco takes
showers every few hours.

In 1970 an underground explosion called Baneberry leaked, sending a towering
cloud, mushroomlike in shape and size, above the flats and cracking the ground
like an earthquake. The fissures were two or three feet wide in some places and
made the roads into Area 12, site of the blast, impassable.

The camp at Area 12, where some nine hundred workers lived in trailers and,
sometimes, tents, was swept with fallout. Three hundred were found to be
contaminated with radiation. The NTS authorities panicked. The radiation release
was a PR nightmare; sabotage was suspected. The authorities immediately sent
Bacco and a crew of other workers to patch the road. The members of his crew
are almost all dead now, he tells me. “It was hotter than a motherfucker,” he
said, referring to radiation.

“The foreman was Herschel Baker, and there was Charlie Archulet, who’s dead
now.” He lists the names of his other crewmates. “We had to put chains on the
four-by-four.”

It was snowing heavily that day yet sparks flew from Bacco’s long johns. It was
so hot, the workers’ safety badges were quickly overwhelmed with radiation.
“There was electricity all over my body,” he told me. “Red and green sparks.

“Later I was paralyzed, and I was passing blood for six or seven months.”

It was an account full of primal fear, as much from what he had seen as
experienced.

He talked of men who had fallen asleep in trailers before the blast and been
killed. He had hauled out bodies. Beside the baseball diamond in Mercury,
workers had burned dead cattle and drums of waste, incinerated the badges that
recorded how much radiation the workers had received, “to hide the evidence.”

One of the men contaminated by Baneberry, the supervisor, Harley Roberts,
fought the AEC and later DOE, and helped win rights and recognition for the
workers. Baker and others in the crew developed leukemia within two years of
the shot. In 1972 Roberts and a worker named William Nunamaker filed suit for
some eight million dollars against the NTS, charging negligence. The case
lingered on for ten years as the court kept postponing judgment. But by 1974,
Harley Roberts was dead.

Bacco’s requests for benefits had been denied. Both his old employer REECO,
Reynolds Electric, the largest contractor at the site, and the Department of
Energy claimed to have no record of his employment, even though he had his
work identification card. “They thought, This is a sucker, we use him,” Bacco
said. “I was a guinea pig.”

Where had I heard stories before of employment records being made to
disappear? In Lazar’s tale, of course.

At the hearing, Bacco told his story with a practiced rhythm. He explained how
the Department of Energy had tried to settle with him.

“The lawyer offered me twenty thousand. I told him a big bad word. What I
wanted was my job back. I talked to the doctor. All I said was, do me a favor,
when I die give my body to research.

“ ‘Well, Joe,’ the doctor said, ‘you ought to feel lucky you’re still living. Just
keep taking those showers.’ ”

The lady from DOE shook her head sadly. This sort of thing was all supposed to
be in the past for the department. Yes, mistakes had been made, but a new page
had been turned.

The original creators of the test site were motivated by nothing less than a
desperate need to save the planet. A few thousand acres of land, a few hundred
lives, were necessary casualties. They were driven with all the intensity of
scientists in fifties sci-fi movies, rushing to come up with a weapon to defeat
mutant giant ants or invading saucers. But that was in the past. The lady from

DOE explained that with testing stopped, the department was looking for new
uses for the test site: A solar energy farm was being considered.

The test site tours were at once part of the new attitude and a revival of the
proud tradition of News Nob, where Walter Cronkite, Bob Considine, Dave
Garroway, John Cameron Swayze, and others were courted as they reported on
the Bomb. DOE was trumpeting its new openness, making available old records,
pledging never again to expose soldiers and downwind civilians to radiation.

Derek and I did not discuss the way that the bombs exploded at the test site
had affected Dreamland.

Among the newly opened records were documents showing that Dreamland
itself had been a victim of fallout and of nuclear blasts, even after U-2 testing
began there. Work on the U-2 and later the Blackbirds would be placed at the
mercy of the needs of nuclear testing. Even the crews and pilots at Groom Lake
were in danger. Kelly Johnson had been concerned from the beginning about the
dangers of fallout and, sure enough, the work at Groom would frequently be
interrupted with warnings or evacuations whenever testing took place. The
authorities debated which tests at Groom Lake, if any, would justify delaying a
nuclear test.

The first part of Operation Plumbob was called Project 57, conceived to ensure
that a nuclear weapon damaged or dropped in an accident or otherwise broken
open would not detonate—even if some of its conventional explosives went off.

The test took place just seven miles from the main base at Groom, in the
Groom Lake Valley, near the mine. A ten-by-sixteen-mile block of land
surrounding the planned location was added to the test site and designated Area
13.

No one involved with Project 57 seems to have had much of a contingency
plan if the bomb wiped out the U-2 program already under way at the lake, not
to mention the mine and its operators. Later it occurred to the people in charge
that, with the base at Groom growing, this was not a good thing. So in the 1980s
the government spent twenty-one million dollars to have the land scraped and
the toxic portions removed, a process clearly visible in spy satellite shots.

In June 1957, training for the U-2 pilots was moved to Texas, probably because
of the bomb tests. Soon afterward, Project 57 began with a huge blast called
Hood detonated from a balloon fifteen hundred feet over Area 9, about fourteen
miles southwest of Groom Lake. At seventy-four kilotons it was the most
powerful airburst ever set off within the continental United States. There was no
public announcement. Fallout descended on Groom Lake, and the concussion
shattered windows in the mess hall and a barracks and buckled the doors of two
metal buildings.

During the tests, the crews at the new base were regularly warned and

evacuated. They were unaware that they were part of a long tradition and that
other neighbors of the test site had not been so lucky.

During these years, a man named Bob Sheahan assembled a unique photo album
of Dreamland. The mushroom clouds rising from the spots I had visited at
Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flat were visible from his home at Groom Mine, on a
ridge about forty miles from ground zero. He took dozens of pictures of the
blasts, a whole catalog of mushrooms—twenty, thirty Hiroshimas, seen from the
edge of what was to become Dreamland.

Bob Sheahan had grown up around Groom Mine, with its cluster of work
buildings and adjacent cabins. The mine has been in his family since 1885 and
his father, Dan, ran it now. Bob was thirty-one, a former engineering student at
the University of Nevada, when one day in early 1951 a polite, well-dressed man
from the Atomic Energy Commission came calling. There would be atomic blasts,
he warned them, at the new proving ground about thirty miles to the southwest,
and some radioactive fallout might drift over the mountains. It would head
northeast toward them, crossing the Groom Range at Coyote Gap, near the site of
what would become the town of Rachel, with its little monitoring site on the
town square. The AEC man gave the Sheahans a Geiger counter and taught them
how to use it. He left flat sticky plates to catch fallout for later testing. He set up
a radio.

Dan Sheahan had the Atomic Energy Commission boys sign his guest book.
“We’re all family,” he said.

The first shot, on February 2, 1951, broke the Sheahans’ front door and
cracked several windows. Others quickly followed. With the Korean War turning
ugly, research into tactical nuclear weapons was pushing ahead hard.

Soon the Sheahans began to see signs of the fallout. Bits of metal big enough to
pick up with a magnet, all that was left of the vaporized steel towers, fell out of
the sky. The Geiger counter showed the metal was hot.

Strange white spots about the size of a silver dollar began to appear on the
backs of cattle and horses. These, the AEC man would tell them, were called beta
burns. One day Sheahan saw an object on the ground, and when he got close he
found it was a dead deer, marked with the same white spots as the cattle. He
noticed something else strange: There were very few rabbits. Usually, the desert
was full of them—you would mount any rise and startle one—but now he hardly
saw any.

The first series of shots came in rapid succession. They were part of the series
called Upshot Knothole. But the fallout from the series called Operation Buster
Jangle was worse. These were run mostly by the Army, which set up a whole tent
town at the proving ground called Camp Desert Rock and exposed tanks and
troops and all sorts of equipment to the edges of the blast. In one test, the Army

tried to determine the effects of an atomic blast on uniforms at varying distances
from ground zero. Miniature uniforms complete with zippers, snaps, and toggles
were custom sewn to fit each of 111 white Chester hogs. The pig was chosen
because, flattering to our species or not, its muscle and fat distribution most
nearly resemble those of a human being.

Most of the pigs, each in its specially tailored little pig uniform, ended up
barbecued alive, and there must have been a smell of roasting pork that might
not have been entirely repulsive. The test was jokingly called “The Charge of the
Swine Brigade.” But the troops too were being exposed—far more than many
knew—to radiation.

On May 5, 1952, soldiers came to warn the Sheahans of an impending very
“dirty shot” and suggested they evacuate. Dan and Bob Sheahan stayed; the rest
of the family went to Las Vegas. The next day, a blast went off that broke
windows and ripped sheet metal from the buildings.

Worst of them all was the ninth shot in the series, code-named Harry, on
March 24, 1953. It irradiated some four thousand sheep being herded through
Coyote Gap. Within a few days they would all die.

The fallout from the Harry blast traveled as far as St. George, Utah—to the
northeast—with deadly effect. Years later the trail of cancers it left among the
“downwinders” became the subject of lawsuits. By the nineties, however, it was
clear that most of the American population had been downwinders. A report
credited the blasts with causing some seventy thousand cases of thyroid cancer
alone.

After “Dirty Harry,” cattle drinking from Papoose Lake died, but the Sheahans
still felt the AEC was taking care of them. They once made a trip to the office at
the test site. An officer forthrightly explained to them that the shots were set off
when the winds blew toward Groom, to avoid sending the fallout toward Las
Vegas.

Once, the soldiers came to check the Sheahans’ water hole. They took samples
and the sergeant assured them it was fine. Then one of the enlisted men asked if
he could have a cup of water. “Can’t you wait until we get back to camp,
soldier?” his commander gruffly interrupted. When the men realized the
implications of their exchange, both became silent and embarrassed.

During all this time, Dan and Bob Sheahan had to halt operations at the mine,
sometimes for two weeks at a time, because of the tests. Nor was the mine safe
from conventional weapons. It was still part of the gunnery and bombing range,
and in 1954, an overeager trainee strafed the mine buildings, presumably
mistaking them for one of the target buildings on the range.

Finally Dan Sheahan discovered that his wife, Martha, had cancer. He would
eventually sue the AEC, but the Sheahans held on to their land and mine, passing

it to the next generation, Pat and Bob, and worked out an uneasy truce with the
Air Force. But Bob never showed off his photographs, and into the nineties he
was afraid to talk at all about the mine lest the Air Force make his life difficult.

By the seventies, Martha Sheahan had wondered how the military could say
they were defending freedom at the base while trampling on the freedoms of
those on its edge. But after the guards showed up at the mine in 1984, the
Sheahans fell silent. At least some of the family were given security clearances,
and when I talked to them in the mid-nineties other family members were still
unwilling to criticize what the government had done. “They take care of us,” one
family member said of the Air Force. He refused to talk. He didn’t want to be
identified.

The dirty blasts of the early fifties baptized Groom and Papoose lakes in
radiation. And the base that would grow up there, like a gigantic sci-fi mutant,
would share the ethos of emergency, justifying the pollution of the “unpopulated”
areas around it.

In its own irrepressible way, Las Vegas seized on the proximity of the test site
in a more festive manner. The bright boomerangs and bubbles of neon on the
Strip arrived just about the same time the flying saucers did. In honor of the
destruction of Doomtown, the suburban town built in 1955 for the Apple II
explosion, one Vegas hotel filled its swimming pool with mushrooms. Parties
assembled to watch the blasts from convenient high spots. There were picnics on
Mount Charleston, halfway up to Mercury, a future site of Interceptor
expeditions. Even weddings were scheduled to coincide with nuclear tests:
honeymoon in Las Vegas! Did the earth move for you too, dear? The mushroom
cloud became another party theme, like the themes of the Old West, the Middle
East, Ancient Rome, invoked as keynotes for decor at the Frontier, the Sands, or
Caesars Palace. The Flamingo served an Atomic Cocktail—vodka, brandy,
schnapps, and a touch of sherry. Gigi, its top hairdresser, arranged wire to
produce an Atomic Hairdo. In May 1957 the Sands held a Miss Atomic Bomb
contest in which the competing beauties appeared with the iconic mushroom
cloud, modeled in cotton, glued to their silvery swimsuits.

Las Vegas is hardly typical of the United States, but for a time the whole country
shared in the eagerness to embrace the atom. The historian Paul Boyer calls it the
search for the silver lining to the mushroom cloud. There was an effort to
downplay the effects of fallout and blast—it was actually proposed that a good
wide-brimmed hat could offer a lot of protection—and civil defense drills became
a common activity for schoolchildren. The stylized logo of the atom, with its
zippy futuristic orbiting electrons, was soon joined by the three triangles on
yellow of the fallout shelter as nuclear age icons. Disney published a children’s
book called Our Friend the Atom, and the Boy Scouts added an atomic energy
merit badge to their sashes. But beneath the cheery atom culture—so well

documented in the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe —was a deeper and frequently
denied fear. The atomic bomb shook heartland America to the core.

While Las Vegas was dancing to “The Atomic Bounce,” country-and-western
music struggled to deal with the darker fears of the bomb. As I drove the fringes
of Dreamland, I often played tapes of music from the fifties. One song in
particular seemed to sum up poignantly middle America’s effort to deal with the
shadow of the mushroom cloud. “The Great Atomic Power,” by Ira and Charlie
Louvin and Buddy Bain, documented the bomb’s impact on the nation:

Do you fear this man’s invention that they call atomic power?

Are we all in great confusion?

Do we know the time or hour?

When a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land,

Leaving horrible destruction,

Blotting out the works of man.

Are you ready for that great atomic power?

Will you rise and meet your savior in the air?

Will you shout or will you cry

when the fire rains from on high?

Are you ready for that great atomic power?

The Louvins’ song belonged to a tradition of songs beginning with “Atomic
Bomb,” penned by the sleepless Fred Kirby the very night the first bomb was
dropped on Japan, August 7, 1945. Recorded by many groups, “Atomic Bomb”
was joined by such numbers as “The Hell Bomb,” “Jesus Hits Like an Atom
Bomb,” and similar songs, which were big hits in the late forties and early fifties.

Like others in the genre, “The Great Atomic Power” was a conflation of Bible
and Cold War, a rendition of the apocalypse as nuclear holocaust. The bomb’s
coming was the Second Coming and you’d better be ready, better turn to Jesus
for salvation. The song was a desperate, even heroic, effort to graft the impact of
the bomb onto fundamentalist Christian theology, to force the terrible new
knowledge into the net of traditional teaching and, grotesquely, deform it. Here
was Jesus as the ultimate version of Strategic Air Command—“He will be your
shield and sword”—right off the logos painted on the noses of B-36s and B-47s.

“When the mushroom of destruction falls in all its fury great, God will surely
save his children from that awful awful fate.”

SAC’s Gen. Curt LeMay, however, wasn’t waiting for God; his plan was to hit
the Russians with everything he had before they could light up the skies over
New York and Washington, over Dallas or Nashville, or over Omaha, home of

SAC, seat of the religion of airpower.

7. Victory Through Airpower

Embracing the Nevada Test Site and looming over Las Vegas on the map, the
Nellis Air Force Base wrapped Dreamland in the ideology of airpower.

The huge bright tank of jet fuel at the entrance to the base read global power for
America. Emblazoned with the shield and sword of the Air Combat Command, the
tank shimmered in the heat just up the road from the pawnshops and watering
holes (SNAFU Lounge) that have sprung up on the verges of the base.

Dreamland is part of Nellis’s vast bombing ranges, but Nellis is best known as
the home of the Air Force’s Red Flag training games, the equivalent of the Navy’s
famed Top Gun school. During Red Flag exercises the sky for hundreds of miles
around the base is filled with aircraft—twenty-two thousand sorties are flown a
year.

I stopped by the edge of Nellis’s runway one afternoon during a Red Flag to
watch the airplanes returning. A half dozen or so cars and trucks had gathered,
with people lounging in the driver’s seats or sitting lazily on the hoods. Their
expressions bore the patient, purposeless air of fishermen.

F-15s and F-16s came home in pairs, each touching down with a little puff of
smoke as its tires hit the pavement. A big AWACS plane, a huge hump of an
antenna on its back, came in over our heads, and a helicopter drifted past,
creating a little crater of dust.

For Red Flag, the planners at Nellis are constantly creating “notional
countries,” imagined allies and aggressor nations that play out the scenarios of
conflict, drawing fictional nations on the map of the area around Dreamland. In
one Red Flag scenario, for instance, a friendly little country named Cavalier is
menaced by aggressive Sirocco.

In the absence of war, or rather in the Cold War the military has fought in the
last half century, the game is the thing: Witness the constant playing of war
games, from the high level of Herman Kahn, the doomsday theorist of nuclear
holocausts, to those of Top Gun and Red Flag.

Geopolitical scenarios played out by Pentagon planners are popularized in the
military technothrillers of Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, Harry Coyle, and others.
Dreamland crops up in them repeatedly. Clancy makes reference to flying saucer
lore when he has a character joke about “the Frisbees of Dreamland.” Brown,
who flew in Red Flags during his Air Force days, describes a fictional High Tech
Aerospace Weapons Center, HAWC, at Groom Lake in his novels Sky Masters and
Flight of the Old Dog, “a secret U.S. Air Force research facility in Dreamland that

conducts flight-test experiments on new and modified aircraft and new weapon
systems.”

Sky Masters —dedicated to Curtis LeMay, “the Iron Eagle”—describes the
testing of fuel air bombs, a real technology in which a huge cloud of gasoline
vapor is ignited, producing a shock wave that crushes troops on the ground—a
miniature Tokyo firestorm.

For Nellis, Dreamland is always “the Box.” Military Operating Areas, forbidden
to civilian air traffic, show up on aviation maps, marked with the acronym MOA
—an unintentional irony, since the moa, a now extinct bird from New Zealand,
was flightless. They are given names like Talon and Cheyenne. 1

Pilots take the Box very seriously—because their commanders do. It is the most
restricted MOA, off-limits even to the military pilots, at all altitudes and all times.

At the beginning of every Red Flag session crews spend several hours and one
two-hour sortie being oriented to the various Nellis ranges, memorizing
landmarks so that in the heat of “battle” they do not stray into the Box. Even
crossing buffer zones around R-4808 (airspaces R-4807, R-4806, R-4809) results
in the crews being given a slap on the wrist, but it happens frequently.

A former Red Flag player explained to me, “If a pilot accidentally strayed into
the area, the day’s exercises would immediately terminate and the offending
aircraft would be ordered to land at an isolated area on the east side of Nellis
AFB. Intelligence officers would confiscate the radar film, detain the crew, search
everything in the cockpit, and then conduct a lengthy interview to determine
why there was an overflight. Overflying R-4808 is cause for very heavy penalties,
including an automatic Article 15 [administrative reprimand, which for officers is
the kiss of death], demotion, and loss of pay. If the overflight was intentional,
one could expect a court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and imprisonment.”

Nellis was created as part of the network of bases built up in the vast West in
anticipation of World War II—the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School,
established in January 1941. By June, the school was graduating four thousand
students every five or six weeks. A number of auxiliary runways were built in the
huge expanse of the range, including two five-thousand-foot runways laid out in
a cross tilted to the northwest on the edge of Groom Lake. Soon the lake bed was
littered with .30- and .50-caliber shells.

After the war, Nellis served as a major mustering-out point for airmen and
soldiers. It was closed down in 1947 but reactivated two years later, in time to
become the main fighter-pilot training center during the Korean War and,
eventually, the temple of fighter tactics and esprit. It would become the home of
the Thunderbirds, the Air Force aerobatic team.

Today, in the dry cleaners and pizza joints surrounding Nellis, proud
entrepreneurs display signed Thunderbird photos, Thunderbird banners,

Thunderbird plaques. The Air Force aerobatics team figures here something like
the football teams in other cities. There are weekly tours of the Thunderbird
hangar, led by a disarming PR man. On the tour I joined, the crowd was largely
oldsters. “Aren’t they handsome?” said one woman, looking at the photographs of
the pilots on the wall. In an auditorium, the guide sketched Thunderbird history
and glory in slides and narrative. At the end of the presentation, questions were
entertained. Immediately came the impertinent inquiry from a retiree at the back
of the room: “Do you have anything to do with this Area 51?” A faint scattered
laugh came from the knowing minority.

“That’s where we get our pilots,” said the PR man, quick-witted. “No, seriously,
that’s a good one. I wish I knew.”

On a ridge above the dry lake called Muroc, one hundred miles north of Los
Angeles, some fifty years before I stood on Freedom Ridge, a loose gaggle of men
stood shivering in front of small fires. In the hour just before dawn on January 8,
1944, some two dozen engineers and workers of the original Lockheed Skunk
Works awaited the first flight of the jet fighter they had produced in only sixty-
eight days, the XP-80.

Among them was a man named Wally Bison, who had worked in the Skunk
Works from the beginning.

“It was cold, colder than a well,” Bison told me years later. “All of a sudden
somebody said, ‘Here he comes,’ and the airplane passed by a couple of hundred
feet off the deck in dead silence. Then the jet blast came, a sound we’d never
heard before. I was goose pimples from the top of my head to the bottom of my
feet.” That sound, he said, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere in
particular.

The plane was called Lulu Belle, but the guys around the shop had wanted to
call it “the Fartin’ Fury of Forty-four.” These men worked on a relentless
schedule; the big legends above the girlie calendars gloomily read, “Our Days Are
Numbered.”

The formal name of the facilities around Rogers Dry Lake, where Jack
Northrop and other aviation pioneers had tested planes in the twenties, was the
Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. As early as 1933 the Air Corps had
established a gunnery range on the lake bed not far from a small settlement
established by Clifford and Eve Corum in 1910. When the Corums had applied to
set up a sub-post office under their name in the store for the convenience of
customers, the authorities replied that the name Corum had already been taken
by another office. So they reversed the letters and it became Muroc. The word,
with its accidental overtones of Morocco, of the French mur and rock, had an
appropriately rugged, dry sound.

With the coming of the war, the military arrived in force at Muroc and other

dry lakes—China Lake, El Mirage—and chased off the hotrodders and cyclists.
The Navy built a wooden mock-up of a Japanese cruiser, a gray looming practice
target, with only the dry lake for waves. They named it the Muroc Maru, and for
years it floated on the liquid of mirage. Within months of Pearl Harbor there
were thousands of men and hundreds of bombers and fighters here and at tens of
other new bases springing up throughout the West, safely inland and isolated.

The airplane that flew that day in January 1944 was the second “black”
aircraft, the first product of the Lockheed Skunk Works and as secret as the
Manhattan Project. Bell Aviation had built the first, the XP-59, and flown it here
in 1943. Optimistically named “Aircomet,” the XP-59 turned out to be little
better than the best prop planes of the day—a lesson from the beginning that
black projects could turn out turkeys as well as eagles.

But the project had already begun to display the little signs of camaraderie and
conspiratorial clannishness of black projects to come. The Bell crew took the
derby hat as their symbol and would fly wearing derbies and gorilla masks,
waving cigars as they buzzed hapless fighter trainees, who nearly fell from the
sky in shock. Forbidden to acknowledge their work openly, they sported insignia
from which the propellers had been removed.

When they went out to Juanita’s in Rosamond, and Pancho Barnes’s famous bar
closer to the base, they wore black derbies and fake mustaches from a Hollywood
prop store.

But once the Lockheed jet flew, the XP-59 was doomed. Lockheed’s XP-80
proved a durable design. Quickly improved with a more powerful engine, it
became the YP-80A, “the Gray Ghost.” Eventually some six thousand aircraft
based on the type would be produced, a whole family of jets, including the P-80
and F-80 military fighter, the Shooting Star, and the T-33 trainer.

That cold January day, the head of the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, stood
impatiently by the airplane in a long overcoat and knit watch cap. Johnson, then
just thirty-three years old and the designer of the Lockheed Electra, the P-38
Lightning fighter, and—for Howard Hughes—the lovely tri-tailed Constellation
airliner, had flown to Wright Field in Dayton just the summer before. At one-
thirty on the afternoon of June 8, 1943, he had been handed a signed contract to
build the airplane that was now complete.

Wally Bison, the Skunk Works veteran, remembered something else. An old
man when I talked to him, he had a hard time recalling names, and he kept
apologizing. But Bison remembered that Johnson took the whole gang to a
restaurant for lunch—and paid for it. Used to bringing his lunch to work in a
brown bag, Bison saw this as an act of unprecedented largesse on the part of the
penny-pinching Johnson.

When the jet contract arrived, Johnson had to build his own secret team. All of

Lockheed’s production capacity, all of its engineers and workers, were so pressed
to meet normal wartime contracts for the P-38, for B-17 bombers for the Army,
sub hunters for the Navy, and Hudson Bombers for the British, that Johnson had
to scrounge a staff of twenty-three engineers and about twice as many mechanics,
fabricators, and clericals.

Johnson would often fix or construct some part himself. He was proud of the
strength he had acquired putting up lath as a teenager. He had been the seventh
of nine children from a poor Swedish American family in Michigan and baptized
Clarence, taking the name Kelly when his classmates deemed his sometimes
violent streak more Irish than Swedish.

Johnson grew up reading Tom Swift and the Rover Boys in the local Carnegie
library in Ishpeming, Michigan, a mining town that sent its ore to Carnegie’s
mills. He built dozens of model planes, and by the time he was twelve he knew
he wanted to be an aircraft designer. He put himself through the University of
Michigan by washing dishes and putting up the plaster lath, and had been at
Lockheed since 1933, when he was hired at a salary of thirty-three dollars a
week. His first achievement was pointing out a serious aerodynamic flaw in the
prototype Model 10 Electra, on which the firm’s entire fortunes rode, and then
figuring out how to fix it.

At just thirty-three, Kelly Johnson was already one of the top aircraft designers
in the world. He met Amelia Earhart and prepared her Electra for her record
flights as well as for her last, fatal journey. He had worked for Howard Hughes
on the Constellation airliner that had flown for the first time almost exactly a
year before, as the C-69, and already gone into service for the military.

During work on the Constellation, Johnson met often with Hughes, huddling
with the billionaire in one of his bungalows. A pilot whose fame had grown from
a record round-the-world flight during the 1930s, Hughes tested the plane
himself. Once when he took the wheel of the prototype, Johnson and others in
the plane were overcome with terror as Hughes attempted to stall the airplane to
test its stability. When the airspeed indicator read dead zero, Johnson forced
Hughes away from the controls.

Johnson’s methods were instinctive and highly practical. He demanded
whenever possible that stock parts be used or adapted, and he administered by
emotional economy as well: by temper and fear. But he could exhibit flashes of
kindness, too.

Bison recalled that “Johnson could be intimidating and brutal, but at our
parties he was delightful. When I had to go to Kelly’s office, I was in fear, but in
the end I was always amazed at his knowledge of the most detailed things.” The
key to Skunk Works speed was efficient administration. “The main thing was that
Johnson cut the paperwork. We drew things upstairs, then walked down and told
the mechanic, ‘Build the damn thing,’ and then you helped him do it.”

Johnson and his staff had already been looking ahead to jets. They had
proposed a design called the L-133, a stainless steel vision of the future, with a
jet engine of Lockheed’s own design, a long fuselage, and canards promising a top
speed of 650 miles per hour. On May 17, 1943, when Johnson was on a visit to
Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, a general took him aside and told him of the XP-
59A, that hapless Bell jet, kept secret at Muroc with a fake propeller on its nose.
He wanted Johnson to do something better. On the airliner home, his ulcer
working overtime, he jotted down the ideas for a jet fighter he thought could be
built in six months, something that could be a war winner.

The spaces where the engineers set up their drawing boards and the shops
downstairs were cobbled together around a machine shop beside Lockheed’s
wind tunnel, housed in a leaky addition built from the old wooden crates in
which Wright engines had been shipped, the roof made from a rented circus tent.

Working ten-hour days, six days a week, the group put the jet in the air just
143 days after formal signing of the contract. The smell of chemicals seeped into
the crude buildings from a factory next door, and an engineer named Irv Culver
picked up the phone one day and spoke the immortal words, “Skunk Works.”
Inspired by A1 Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, Skunk Works is named after the still
where a character named Injun Joe brewed up a foul moonshine called Kickapoo
Joy Juice. And the question Culver and the others kept being asked but could not
answer was “What’s Kelly brewing up in there?”

The name was born of secrecy. There was no official designation, so those
inside had to dream one up.

Johnson continued to call the base Muroc for years after the name was officially
changed to Edwards Air Force Base, after Glen Edwards, a test pilot killed in a
crash. But by 1955, when the Skunk Works was looking for a place to test the U-
2, Edwards was no longer private enough. Like some wild species that needed
lots of range or whose environment was changed by the advance of civilization,
the engineers who built secret aircraft had to flee farther and farther into the
wilderness.

The Skunk Works would create the airplanes that made Dreamland necessary,
and its legend grew up along with the secret base. It developed a far-flung fan
club of buffs as devoted and dogmatic as any group of Roswell believers or saucer
conspiracists. It even emerged as a business model, a method to get things done
in a lean and mean way, after the management guru Tom Peters wrote
approvingly of it. The Skunk Works, the buffs believed, had done nothing less
than save the world several times. The U-2 and the Blackbirds had prevented
World War III; the Stealth fighter had won the Gulf War.

One day I drove to Burbank to visit one of the Skunk Works’ most devoted
buffs and see the original site. My guide was a local man named R. C. “Chappy”

Czapiewski. Chappy was proof of the power of the legend: He had never worked
at the Skunk Works or served in the branches of the military that flew its
airplanes, but was simply a citizen who appreciated its achievements and was
caught up in its history and lore.

We met in downtown Burbank, which contrary to all of Johnny Carson’s jokes
struck me as a pleasant place: an inoffensive mall, a new media center, and a
series of elegant Modern-style public buildings. The soaring lobby of its city hall
was a WPA-era fantasy, painted with romantic murals of thirties aircraft and
heroic images of movie cameras—icons of the leading local industries.

A querulous man who spoke with an edge of outrage, Chappy appeared
something of a pain in the ass to the local city councilmen. I had to like him right
away. Over a Japanese lunch he agreed to take me on a tour. He gave me a
yellow-green button that read sos: save our skunk works.

He was trying to muster the citizenry of Burbank to save the original Skunk
Works buildings from destruction and turn at least one of them into a museum
dedicated to the airplanes designed here, from the P-38 to the Stealth fighter.

The organization most opposed to this plan, he told me, was Lockheed itself.
The local airport authority coveted the land on which the hangars stood for a
planned expansion, and Lockheed had agreed to sell it.

“This was historic,” Chappy lamented, “and now it’s being forgotten. It was
secret, but we—all of us living here—knew what was happening. The U-2, the
Blackbird, the Stealth—they won the Cold War. Kids today don’t remember the
Cold War. They think U-2 is a rock band.” 2

We wandered among the hangars. Crape myrtle trees dotted the avenue in
front of them, their pinks and greens virtually the only touch of color across
expanses of gray pavement, gray chain-link.

Lockheed had painted the hangars a soft yellow, the yellow of creme brulee or
the yellow rose of Texas. They had chosen the same color out at Helendale in the
secret RCS complex.

We could see building number 360 with its complex system of window panels.
This, Chappy pointed out, is where they did the F-104—“the Starfighter,” “the
missile with a man in it”—developed to counter the superiority of the MiG-15s
American pilots encountered in Korea. Stubby-winged, with a downward-firing
ejection seat, it would be a hot rod, but also a widowmaker, with no more glide
in it than a bathtub pushed off a roof.

Here, Kelly and his boys created the U-2, and turned back over to the U.S.
government—your tax dollars at work—$2 million of the $26 million he had
agreed to accept and a tossed-in half dozen extra airplanes to boot. There, first
for the CIA and then for the Strategic Air Command, they built the Blackbirds,
the A-12 and the YF-12, then the SR-71, pioneering whole new technologies such

as extruding titanium to create a plane that, through the millennium, will be the
fastest and highest-flying.

“Beside those hangars,” Chappy said, “is where they set up the first Stealth
prototype between two tractor-trailer trucks with camou net covering the ends
and fired up the engine.”

There, the Stealth fighter grew from a mere footnote in a Soviet scientific
journal into a black-faceted body. Appearing hacked, chopped, with every corner
cut, its shape was the very embodiment of the Skunk Works philosophy, a treatise
on the theme of cutting away all excess. “Keep It Simple, Stupid” was the motto
—KISS. “Simplificate and add lightness.”

At the end of the flight line was the big hangar, where stealth watchers had
seen shadowy tarpaulin-covered payloads moving into huge cargo planes—things
on flatbed rail cars.

“They were flying something on a big C5A out of here in 1991 and 1992. They
would shut the airport down when sensitive cargo was being loaded,” Chappy
recalled. “They stopped all airport traffic at eleven-thirty on Friday for it.”

After a Japanese sub surfaced off the coast of California in 1941, Lockheed put
in a desperate call to the Disney studios. Their best artists came in to hide the
factory under camouflage. They created an artificial, subscale village atop the
factory buildings and airport terminal, a model of the very American way of life
they were designing and building airplanes to save, the American dream
trumpeted in magazine ads and radio serials. Workers inside turned out P-38
fighters and B-17 bombers, then went home to little bungalows very like the little
Monopoly houses above their heads.

From the air, you couldn’t tell where the roof stopped and actual houses
started. Huge poles held up the netting and camouflage, done in chicken feathers,
and the real buildings beneath were painted in similar mottled vegetable shapes.
“Someone who worked here,” Chappy said, “told me that when it rained the
chicken feathers stank to high heaven.”

The Skunk Works was the best argument for black projects, but it was always a
gamble. There had been failures: the Saturn commercial transport, the F-90
fighter, the weird tail-landing XFV-1 Salmon (named for Herm “Fish” Salmon, the
test pilot and only man crazy enough to ever fly the damn thing). The D-21
drone, a secret for decades. Suntan, the liquid hydrogen-powered superplane of
the late fifties that cost $2 billion before someone stopped to consider the
expense of building bases with cryogenic facilities to keep it fueled. Even the
successes were close enough to failures, like the A-12, the Blackbird, which by
rights should never have worked and reminded you that this was gambling at
very high stakes.

But as I rode around with Chappy, I found the sense of the legend beginning to

wilt. I wondered if now, perhaps, the darkness was too great and the gambles no
longer paid off.

I kept thinking about a talk I had had with Ben Rich, the last head of the Skunk
Works to preside over the Burbank facility, and I remembered his tone. He had
written a book, but when he submitted it for review, two chapters had been
rejected by the CIA and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It still irked
him. Why, they had made him lock up his coffee mug, the one that read mach 3 plus
with a picture of the SR-71. But that speed had never been officially released to
the public; the information was still classified. So each evening the mug went
into a safe, and each morning it came out again so Rich could sip his decaf.

Only one other group of people irked Rich as much as the security people: the
EPA bureaucrats, who threatened to shut down his program if it didn’t comply
with regulations. To him, the concern for information leaks and leaks of
chemicals into the water table were somehow equivalent. I often wondered if
secrecy itself hadn’t become a toxin, extremely powerful and useful in controlled
amounts, but treacherous and poisonous if misused or overused.

We drove out of the hangar area past a range of Dumpsters. Suddenly, a big
plastic bag flew up in front of the car. “UFO!” Chappy cried.

The original site of the Skunk Works was now flat and bare, loosely covered with
rubble like a site ready for construction. Across the street, bougainvillea climbed
concrete walls in front of quiet, well-kept homes. In a cruel irony, the Skunk
Works had lived up to its name, pumping PCBs and other pollutants into the
surrounding aquifer, and the company had become the object of massive
litigation. Lockheed had recently settled with a group of local residents for about
$130 million. A huge piping works called a vapor extraction system would pump
steam into the ground and pump the toxins out—a grotesque distillery.

To those imbued with the Skunk Works legend, like Chappy, this rubble-strewn
field was akin to the fields of Gettysburg or Yorktown or Agincourt and should be
preserved in the same ways. But the Skunk Works headed out to Palmdale, closer
to their desert test base. What they left was wreckage.

Driving away from the dark and gory ground of the original Skunk Works, I
passed the Disney complex on the freeway.

While some of his artists were sent to the nearby Lockheed factory to
camouflage it, Disney set others to work creating the alluring myth of airpower—
one of the great myths that was to propel Dreamland.

In 1943 they were to make the film Victory Through Air Power, a powerful piece
of propaganda, offering a neat, ideological solution to the muddles of war—
technology to keep the distant enemies at bay. Filming began only after ten at
night, because there was too much noise during the day from the new P-38s and

B-17s taking off from Burbank airport.

Disney made the film at his own cost, so enamored was he with its source: the
book of the same name by Count Alexander P. de Seversky. A White Russian
emigre who had distinguished himself as a naval aviator in World War I, in
which he lost a leg, he came to the United States when the Revolution erupted.
He allied himself with Billy Mitchell, the maverick general, and after Mitchell
died in 1936 Seversky became the leading exponent of the faith that strategic
bombing would be the dominant force in all modern wars.

He was the head of Seversky Aircraft Corporation (the forerunner of Republic
Aircraft), and his book, a collection of magazine articles, was a huge bestseller
and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It warned Americans that they could no
longer rely on the oceans. They were no longer safe in Kansas City or Chicago.
But Seversky held out a promise—if Americans built a massive force of bombers
and destroyed the distant cities of its enemies first, we could return to our
comfortable isolation.

Seversky laid out the rationale for fighting wars with bombs that would lead to
the A-bomb. Soon the poet Randall Jarrell, who served in the Air Corps, would
write, “In bombers named after girls / We bombed cities we had learned about in
school.”

Seversky, called “Sasha,” narrated Victory Through Air Power in his exotic and
authoritative Russian accent. The film blended newsreels of Mitchell and his
famous demonstration of how to bomb battleships with cartoon explanations of
the development of military aviation. Animated maps explained the present
situation, and represented Allied airpower as an eagle, fighting the Japanese
octopus, destroying its head as the tentacles slowly released their hold.

James Agee, then film critic for Time, found the movie a skillful piece of
propaganda, but he noted that it never showed civilians on the ground, never
showed the target. And he was disturbed by the climactic battle of the eagle of
airpower and the octopus of Japanese aggression and the abstracting of war, with
its total absence of images of the victims. It was full, he wrote, of “gay dreams of
holocaust.”

Richard Schickel has argued in his history of the Disney studios that Disney
liked airpower because it was efficient, clean warfare, in which the corpses are
never seen. And airpower especially seemed to have held great appeal to
Midwesterners like Disney, Curtis LeMay, and Dwight Eisenhower, who once felt
themselves at the greatest remove from foreign influences. Airpower was in an
odd way the flip side of the region’s traditional isolationism, a way to play world
power without sending soldiers overseas. And it seemed cheap, too—in lives and
in dollars—a feature that would make it especially attractive in the postwar
years.

It was not long before Seversky’s and Disney’s dreams of holocaust would be
realized. The B-29, the long-range bomber, was being developed in top secrecy at
Boeing in Seattle even as the film was being made.

Curtis LeMay, then training at Muroc, would follow the B-29 from bases in
India to China, then the Marianas, from which at last the bombers could
effectively reach Japan, Disney’s eagle attacking the octopus.

When the first raids aimed at precision failed to strike their intended targets
owing to bad weather and bad bombing, LeMay was put in command.

The B-29 was a complement to the A-bomb program. When LeMay took over,
crews were training for the A-bomb mission in a godforsaken corner of Utah,
near Wendover, living in barracks little better than huts. But the plane had been
ineffective in carrying out the high-altitude precision bombing for which it was
designed and which was the key tenet of LeMay’s airpower theory. So he tried
something new—gambling the lives of his crews. He turned to terror bombing:
firebombing whole cities. Now his target problem was simpler: find the areas of
cities that were the oldest and had the largest proportion of wooden buildings.
The first target was Tokyo’s Shitamichi district.

Stripping the bombers of most of their guns and sending them in low and at
night, on March 9, 1945, LeMay dispatched 334 bombers from bases in the
Marianas, each carrying about seven tons of incendiary bombs.

The bombs burned more than the sixteen square miles targeted and killed
between 80,000 and 100,000 people. In no other six-hour period of human
history had so many people lost their lives. The firestorm was so powerful it sent
updrafts that tossed the bombers about as their crews breathed the sickening
smoke of burning houses and flesh.

Survivors reported that from the ground the bombers silhouetted against the
sky sometimes looked like the black blades of knives and sometimes, when the
flames lit them from below, like silver moths trapped in the amber reflections.
The bombs themselves seemed to fall like a liquid silver rain rather than a series
of solid, deadly objects.

Women fleeing, carrying babies on their backs, continued walking, seemingly
unconscious that the bundles had burst into flame. Bodies twisted and turned into
the pumice of Pompeiian victims. Those who dropped into canals or pools
seeking refuge boiled to death.

The fires died down fairly quickly, and processions of silent refugees moved
under moonlight amid the burning ruins. One man paused to light a cigar at a
still burning telephone pole.

Time magazine called the raid “a dream come true.” It showed that “properly
kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”

Approximately as many people died in this, the first great triumph of airpower,

as did in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings combined. The step to the
atomic bomb was now only a technical one.

The dominance of airpower was ratified in 1947 by the establishment of the Air
Force as a separate branch of the military, equivalent to the Army and Navy. The
same year brought the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the
declaration of the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. It saw the invention
of the transistor and Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier over the dry
lake at Muroc.

One of the first tasks of the new Air Force was to explain reports of mysterious
craft—possibly craft from distant stars.

They were as shiny as mirrors, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported. He saw nine
objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on the afternoon of June 24, 1947, in
loose formation, shaped like boomerangs or flying wedges, moving at tremendous
speed.

After landing in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold described his sighting to Nolan
Skiff, a columnist for the East Oregonian, and told him how the objects “flew like
a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” The Associated Press picked
up Skiffs story, and in its version the objects changed from flying like a saucer
into “saucer-like” objects, then into “flying saucers.”

The flying saucer would come to inhabit many of the the dreams of the
postwar era, focusing fears and hopes like the lens whose shape it shares,
reflecting the wider culture like its mirrored surface. Nothing says more about its
origins than the birth of its name in the press. For the image of the saucer was
about to become a new kind of mythological figure, a Hermes or Puck, a unicorn
or leprechaun, that flourished not in oral tradition but in the mass media. The
first folk emblem to emerge from the realm of technology, it turned into the most
flexible sort of cultural icon, with overtones ranging from the cosmic—dark
visions of potential invasions—to the comic—a thousand magazine cartoons with
stubby saucers piloted by little green men.

In the days after Arnold’s sighting, dozens of additional reports flowed in from
around the world. In July, the Air Force boldly issued a press release claiming the
“capture” of a flying disc, at Roswell, New Mexico, then decided that the object
had in fact been a weather balloon. The Roswell story quickly dropped from the
headlines—to be reexamined only decades later—but within two months, polls
showed that 90 percent of Americans had heard of flying saucers.

Arnold at first thought he had seen advanced military aircraft. The flying
saucer was “discovered” amid almost daily announcements of wildly new
technologies and rising tensions, which in the new atomic age threatened the end
of the planet. The saucer became a fact of life, like the nuclear threat, and soon it
was common enough to be treated lightly. Billy Ray Riley and his Little Green

Men had a hit record with the rockabilly number “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,”
and by 1957 there was a new toy in American backyards: the saucer-shaped
Frisbee, product of the Wham-0 company.

The embodiment of airpower in its new guise as the atomic deterrent force would
be the Strategic Air Command, and its leader Curtis LeMay.

LeMay took charge in October 1948 and declared the SAC a shambles, with
untrained crews who couldn’t hit their targets. He staged a mock bombing attack
on Dayton, Ohio. It was a dismal failure—most crews missed. LeMay called it the
darkest day in the history of airpower. He proceeded to get the SAC into shape.

He gave SAC its motto: “Peace is our profession.” It said so on its seal, a shield
bearing an armored hand glinting like an airplane against a blue sky—an image
like a knight painted by Piero della Francesca. But the SAC seal had three
lightning bolts and only one olive branch. LeMay’s premise was: We are at war
already. Since the next war would be one of deterrence, won or lost before it
started, we were in effect already fighting World War III. So LeMay kept some of
his planes in the air at all times. All were designed to scramble quickly, with a
red button for one-touch start-up inside the nose wheel wells where you boarded
the plane, for a kind of Le Mans start.

He had no hesitancy about striking first if attack seemed imminent. With every
passing year, the margin of advantage for the United States grew smaller. SAC’s
advantage, LeMay said, was a “wasting asset.” It seemed crazy to him to let the
other guys strike first. “Hit ’em with their pants down,” as George C. Scott urges,
portraying the general in Dr. Strangelove modeled after LeMay.

In June 1950, SAC staged an exercise involving dozens of bombers that
targeted Eglin Air Force Base. In Mission with LeMay, the autobiography LeMay
wrote with MacKinlay Kantor, 3 he described his methods of constant practice:
“We attacked every good-sized city in the United States. People were down there
in their beds, and they didn’t know what was going on upstairs. By the time I left
SAC, ... every city in the United States of twenty-five thousand population or
more had been bombed on innumerable occasions. San Francisco had been
bombed over six hundred times in a month.”

LeMay had an obsession with security and a fear of sabotage. He gained national
publicity when he staged a surprise visit to a SAC hangar and found the security
guy eating lunch. “I saw a man guarding our planes with a ham sandwich,” he
said. He had crack Air Police patrolling SAC bases, like the commando units
depicted in Dr. Strangelove. He dispatched trained “penetrators” to plant notes
that said, “This is a bomb.” This obsession shows up in the film Strategic Air
Command, in which mild-mannered Jimmy Stewart goes back to the Air Force
and is baffled by the rough security checks at the base gate. It’s “Mr. Smith Goes
to Omaha,” and it may be one of the least convincing military movies ever made.

Sometimes they would paste a baby picture or animal picture on the ID badges
just to test security guards. Once a SAC general found soldiers entering his office
to repair phone lines. It took the officer several minutes to remember that the Air
Force used outside repair people. He drew his automatic before the intruders had
time to deposit the slip of paper that read, “This is a bomb.”

The Office of Special Investigations penetrators became a regular nuisance to
SAC crews. LeMay even had his wife tested by a bogus repairman who tried to
penetrate the general’s residence.

SAC’s headquarters was at Offut Air Base in Omaha, Nebraska, formerly a dreary
Army post. The location had been chosen carefully: By the Great Circle route, it
was as far from the bases of Soviet bombers as possible. Like railroad towns,
Offut and the other distant SAC bases at Rapid City or Minot quickly turned into
American dream towns. LeMay made SAC a housing developer, creating whole
new communities around the bases, green-grass Levittowns under blue skies. He
set up hot-rod shops on SAC bases to improve morale. The cars raced on the
runways. It was Pax Atomica, as LeMay liked to call it.

“Do you realize how many babies are born in SAC each month?” said Jimmy
Stewart, as a B-36 pilot in Strategic Air Command. I had been one of those babies.
I grew up on a SAC base.

I grew up with the religion of airpower. I must have been but three or four
when my mother brought home a model of the B-29 on which my father had
flown, all silver, with burgundy prop and tail tips, and I learned that the
airpower that had won the last war was there to prevent the next. Like many of
the Interceptors, I had “imprinted” on these aircraft as a child, the way Konrad
Lorenz described the imprinting nature of goslings. The B-36s overhead were just
a larger, clunkier version of the B-29; the B-52s and B-47s and B-58s would
continue the evolution.

My father figured as a heroic warrior of airpower. Family myth segued neatly
into the national myth that arrived on our primitive black-and-white TV set via
Walter Cronkite and the program The Twentieth Century : how eager American
youths from small towns across the country were sent for training to the new
bases set up far from the vulnerable coasts.

Then Air Power had shuffled the trainees into ethnically mixed all-American
crews—the kid from Brooklyn, the guy from Texas, the farm boy and the city boy
—that would fly from Wichita to Khartoum and Bombay, to China and Guam,
and eventually over the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. My father had bombed Tokyo
in LeMay’s great firestorm, then been shot up over Osaka, left blind, with his
right arm crooked and bent. His left compensated; from my earliest days I
thought it looked like the arm on the baking soda box. Decades later, bits of
shrapnel were still working their way out of his skin.

The B-36, the flagship of SAC during the 1950s, was something of a turkey,
slower and with less range than promised. Originally designed in 1941 to reach
Germany from the United States in case England fell, it first flew in 1946. It was
jokingly called “aluminum overcast” for its huge size. A mechanically ragged
airplane, it was saved by its abundance of engines. There was another joke about
it: “Pilot: Feather four. Engineer: Which four?” The bomber’s big, slow propellers
emitted a distinctive whump-whump sound. One pilot recalls that it sounded like a
streetcar rumbling toward takeoff.

It was huge, with six pusher-prop turbojets set along its wings so thick
crewmen could scramble out to work on the power plants in flight. But the dome
and the bulbous nose gave the plane a stupid, brontosaurian look. In flight, the
great glass-domed turtleback canopy atop the bomber was often filled with blue
smoke from the cigars the pilots felt free to smoke on long flights because LeMay
was rarely without his own stogie. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in SAC it
was a symbol of jaunty esprit, an accent of elan on the way to the end of the
world.

Trophies given to the winning crew in a SAC competition one year were
ashtrays with a B-36 mounted on their rim, circling the smoking ashes beneath.

SAC was staffed by callow youth and bomber vets, “the Blue Sky Boys,” who had
pounded Germany and Japan with Flying Fortresses and Superfortresses and who
got the nod in 1948 to deliver the big ones. SAC’s job was to routinize Doomsday,
to bureaucratize Armageddon. They stayed airborne twenty-four hours a day.

SAC’s Cold War was a new kind of war, but LeMay still needed targets. He
needed them to etch into three-dimensional Lucite templates for the radar
bombsights of his bombers. He needed them to flesh out his Strategic Library
Bombing Index. He needed them to shape the SIOP, the sinister acronym for
single-integrated operating plan—the blueprint for nuclear war.

LeMay needed targets because he alone controlled them. Neither the joint
chiefs nor the president knew the targets in case of nuclear war. LeMay kept the
information to himself until the early sixties. And since there were no locks, no
presidential codes for the weapons, his bombers could have launched a nuclear
war on his authority alone.

LeMay feared dilly-dallying politicians: He wanted to “hit ’em with everything
we’ve got” at the first signs of any massing of the bombers he was sure the
Soviets were rapidly building. But he had very little information. The Soviet
Union was a great black empty space. SAC was still using German maps of the
country from World War II. Human agents had little success. They might manage
to pass for ordinary Soviet citizens, but ordinary Soviet citizens had virtually no
access to the areas and targets desired. Reconnaissance versions of the B-29 had
skirted the perimeter of the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. A variety
of electronic listening and air-sample programs had been in continuous

operation.

Other ideas floated around. In the early fifties a forward-looking officer at
Wright-Pat had taken a look at new engines and wings and realized it might be
possible to fly above radar. Maj. John Seaberg began Project Bald Eagle,
developed to create a high-flying spy plane. Specs were issued, proposals
advanced, but nothing came of it.

Several balloon programs had been used to spy; one was Mogul, the secret
program later officially asserted to have been the source of the Roswell “saucer”
wreckage, aimed at sampling potential fallout from Soviet atomic weapons.

The most ambitious balloon program carried cameras: Project Genetrix, aka
Weapons System 119L, launched polyethylene balloons high into the jet streams.
It operated under the cover story of weather research and the code name Moby
Dick. It involved five launch sites and ten locations for tracking, and the Soviets
protested as soon as the first flight was made, in January 1956. Almost five
hundred balloons were launched; some were shot down, many were lost, and
only forty produced any useful photos. The program ended with the humiliating
spectacle of captured balloons displayed in Moscow’s Gorky Park as evidence of
imperialist treachery.

LeMay also enlisted the help of the British for a less confrontational approach
and supplied them with planes, Canberra bombers adapted for reconnaissance.
They fared poorly. The historian Richard Rhodes records that one pilot from
those missions, looking out of his cockpit, realized what a difficult task it would
be to find anything in the vast landmass. It looked, he said, like “one large black
hole.” Some of the Canberras returned full of bullet holes.

When President Eisenhower, in his Open Skies proposal, suggested that the
United States and the Soviet Union should allow each other free reconnaissance
overflights, the Soviets were suspicious. They rejected the proposal immediately.

At the height of Cold War tensions, in 1956, LeMay sent a fleet of RB-47s over
Vladivostok at noon without approval from his commanders. They took pictures
boldly, brushing off the few MiGs that rose to intercept them. He could easily
have started a war with such a flight. In fact, there is much evidence he regretted
not doing so.

In the spring of 1953, a top-secret RAND corporation study pointed out the
vulnerability of SAC bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers.
That August, just nine months after the first American blast, the Soviets tested
their first hydrogen bomb. LeMay thought they would be ready to attack by 1954
—the year of “maximum danger.” Others, however, believed that salvation from
impending nuclear holocaust could come only from the intervention of agencies
from beyond the threatened planet itself.

8. “Something Is Seen”

Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas one day, I took the southeastern route and
made a diversion to catch a glimpse of the shrine of the saucers. Near Twenty-
nine Palms, where the Marine Corps had its vast desert training ground, stands a
white, domed building called the Integratron. It reminded me of the dome the Air
Force had built atop Bald Mountain to provide a commanding view of
Dreamland.

Here, in April 1954, five thousand people attended “The World’s First
Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention,” and all the important figures from the
flying saucer world were there, including contactees George Adamski, Daniel Fry,
Truman Bethurum, and Orfeo Angelucci.

The event’s organizer was George Van Tassel, a former aircraft mechanic at
Lockheed. In 1947, Van Tassel had leased the airstrip at Giant Rock, named for a
huge boulder in the desert east of Los Angeles. A German spy was rumored to
have hidden beneath the boulder during World War II, and Van Tassel dug rooms
there and established a cafe restaurant for fliers and the less frequent auto
tourists. He furnished one chamber with sofas and couches and even a piano. He
found it just the place to make contact via telepathy of the “omnibeam” with the
space people and “etherians,” and he established a Council of Twelve that
provided “the first mental contact” from Ashtar, commandant of a space station.
Under direction from his voices, Van Tassel began building the Integratron, a
dome-shaped structure that would focus spiritual forces with which to prolong
life and make possible both antigravity transportation and time travel. Left
unfinished at Van Tassel’s death, the building is now derelict, its paint peeling.
After 1955, attendance at the annual “Saucerian conventions” would slowly
decline.

One of the most charismatic figures at the first Saucerian convention was
another Lockheed alumnus, Orfeo Angelucci. One attendee noted that he was the
only one of the contactees she could really imagine on a spaceship, describing
him as “a small, slender, almost fragile man” with “dark, wavy hair, trusting
eyes, and a delicate, semi-ascetic face ... frequently reminiscent of a saint’s head
by da Vinci ... The softness of his voice reflects the quality of quiet
perseverance.”

In 1952 Angelucci was hired at the Lockheed factory in Burbank as a
mechanic. He was a nervous man, often in ill health, who suffered from what he
believed was “constitutional inadequacy.” He felt small. He had been born in
Italy, was not very well educated, and was not at all sure he was going to make it

in the bustling get-ahead southern California culture of the early fifties.

He had pretensions: He believed his wife was a distant relation of the storied
Medici family. He fancied himself something of a thinker. He had seen a UFO in
1946, and pondered its meaning, and for several years had been working on an
ambitious philosophical treatise he called “The Nature of Infinite Entities.” Its
subject matter was “Atomic Evolution, Suspension, and Involution, Origin of the
Cosmic Rays.”

Coming off the late shift at Lockheed on the night of May 23, 1952, Angelucci
felt unwell; his skin prickled. Driving home, he saw a strange red light hovering
above the highway and “pulsating.” It then shot off to the west at about a 30- or
40-degree angle into the sky and vanished. In its place, two smaller green orbs
like green fire hung in front of him.

He pulled off to the side of the road. He understood that the green orbs were
some sort of transmitting and receiving devices. They moved closer and formed a
kind of 3-D film screen between them; two faces, a man’s and a woman’s,
appeared on the screen, and Angelucci heard a voice, declaring them “friends
from another world,” “etherian” beings who had come to Earth.

They asked him if he remembered seeing a UFO on August 4, 1946. He replied
that he did. He was suddenly very thirsty; a crystal cup appeared on the fender of
his car and he drank from it. The beverage tasted wonderful.

The voice told him that distant civilizations were concerned with man’s
“spiritual progress,” which had not kept pace with its material progress. “Weep,
Orfeo,” they said. “For all its apparent beauty, Earth is a purgatorial world
among the planets evolving intelligent life. Hate, selfishness, and cruelty rise
from many parts of it like a dark mist.”

People on Earth, he was told, did not appreciate each other. But the etherians
did. “Every man, woman, and child is recorded in vital statistics by means of our
recording crystal disks. Each of you is infinitely more important to us than to
your fellow earthlings.” They warned of a great cataclysm that would strike Earth
in 1986 if changes were not made.

Angelucci would have more encounters—at the Greyhound bus terminal and in
the dry bed of the Los Angeles River. In 1955, he published an account of his
adventures with the people from space in a book titled The Secret of the Saucers.

As he recounted it, on July 23, 1953, he again felt unwell and stayed home
from work. In the evening he took a walk, and on his way home, in a lonely
place, he felt a “dulling of consciousness.” There, in the bed of the Los Angeles
River, he saw an “igloo-shaped” spaceship, like a “huge, misty soap bubble.” A
door appeared in the bubble craft. He entered and found himself in a vault about
eighteen feet high, lined with some “ethereal mother-of-pearl stuff.” He saw a
chair of the same mother-of-pearl, and when he sat in it, it seemed to mold itself

to his body.

A humming noise puts him into a semi-dream state. He is carried off into
space, and sees the earth from a thousand miles away. He passes a UFO a
thousand feet long, made of a crystalline substance and emitting music and
images of harmoniously evolving planets and galaxies. The UFO is equipped with
“vortices of flame” that serve as both propellers and some mode of telepathic
contact. He wakes to find a mark on his chest about the size of a quarter: a circle
with a dot in the center that he decided was a symbol “of the hydrogen atom.”

In September 1953, he would spend a week in a semiconscious
“somnambulistic state.” He awoke and recalled, as if from a dream, that he had
been spiritually transported to another planetoid and met Orion and his
spacewoman friend Lyra. He learned that he had himself been a spaceman in an
earlier life, named Neptune.

One avid reader of Angelucci’s book was Carl Jung, who had been paying
attention to flying saucers since 1949. He saw them as an example of a modern
myth being born before his very eyes, and nowhere was the process clearer than
in the accounts of contactees, people like Angelucci who claimed not only to
have seen flying saucers but to have spoken with their crews and even flown on
them.

Angelucci’s dreamy account fascinated Jung. Perhaps it was the naive, almost
old-fashioned quality of the experience, as shown even in the design of the
saucer’s crystal walls and mother-of-pearl interior, or the mythological and
archetypal overtones of the author’s name. Orfeo: Orpheus, the poet. Angelucci:
angel of light.

To Jung, Angelucci’s story offered a clear example of the process of a UFO
sighting emerging from a disturbed spirit. He saw Angelucci’s visions, as he
understood all saucer sightings, as the expression of a wider cultural unease and
disturbance. Orfeo was reaching a solution to a problem by something like the
workings of a dream.

“As our time is characterized by fragmentation, confusion, and perplexity,”
Jung declared, “this fact is also expressed in the psychology of the individual,
appearing in spontaneous fantasy images, dreams, and the products of active
imagination.”

In 1958 Jung published his own quite strange book about UFOs called Ein
modemer Mythus: Von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen werden, or, as translated
literally, A Modem Myth: Of Things That Are Seen in the Sky. The English
publishers offered instead a more marketable title: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth
of Things Seen in the Sky.

In the introduction Jung refers to himself as an “alienist”—the nineteenth-
century term for a doctor who treats the insane, from the French alieniste. For

Jung, who analyzed UFOs in their relationship to fantasy and interprets a number
of UFO dreams, the saucers spring from the cultural state of affairs of the fifties—
of the bomb, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the resultant fear and confusion.
He attributed much of the UFO phenomenon to a wide sense of unease in the
culture, and there was, he believed, a tendency for underlying emotions to
“manifest” themselves in observations of real or imagined things. “Universal
spiritual distress” causes us to see archetypal circles in the sky.

Jung did not attempt to decide whether flying saucers were real or not. He
treated them as “symbolical rumors.” For him the saucer was an archetype in the
making, an icon “weightless as thought.” He wrote, “The round shape, the saucer,
is the shape of the center, located deep in the collective unconscious. Such an
object provokes, like nothing else, conscious and unconscious fantasies.”

There was no question for Jung that something had been seen, that observers
had seen something, but whether reality or illusion he was not sure—nor did he
think it very important to distinguish them as such.

“One often did not know and could not discover where a primary perception
was followed by a phantasm,” he wrote, “or whether, conversely, a primary
fantasy originating in the unconscious invaded the conscious mind with illusion
and visions.” In essence, Jung was saying, they might be real and they might not.
But he saw the archetypes living in a kind of unconscious symbol language we all
possessed, and he turned to ancient mythology, religious tracts, astrology,
astronomy, and alchemy for his primary comparisons.

Jung had not discussed the fact that the lore had moved beyond the old oral
and written sources, beyond the campfire, the village square, the learned tome or
tract—and to the modern news media. Increasingly, the mass media had become
the medium where his beloved archetypes now lived and mutated, like organisms
in a lab vial.

Jung was baffled when his first statement on UFOs was picked up by the
popular press as a sign that he believed in flying saucers. He released a clarifying
statement to U.P.I., and was surprised when it was given far less distribution than
the earlier statements.

Had Jung looked more closely at the history of the flying saucer sightings in
his book, he might have noted how vital the role of the press had been from the
very beginning. Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 ur-sighting would never have set off the
saucer obsession had not reporter Nolan Skiff seized on the image of the skipped
saucer; from it was coined the catchy flying saucer —a phrase Arnold had never
uttered—sent out on wire services all over the world.

Jung concluded only that “something is seen but it isn’t known what,”
admitting that this “leaves the question of seeing open.”

He was more interested in what caused the “seeing.” The round shape, such as

that of the saucer, is located deep in the collective unconscious, he declared. It is
the mandala, the rotundum, age-old, deep, and powerful as the lenticular shapes
of galaxies. God is often described as round, a circle with no edge and no center,
or as a watching eyeball. “The center is frequently symbolized by an eye,” as in
the all-seeing eye of the conscience.

When the common center cannot hold, the round shape appears as a wish, a
response to “the fears created by an apparently insoluble poetical situation which
might at any moment lead to a universal catastrophe,” Jung wrote. “At such
times men’s eyes turn to heaven for help, and marvelous signs appear from on
high.” A rationalistic world grounded in science and technology, a world of
“statistical or average truths,” perhaps unable to deal with these things, creates
“an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary.”

And if there really were aliens here? Then, Jung states, we would be in the
position of a primitive tribe dominated by white Western power. The reins of
power would be wrenched from our hands. “As an old witch doctor once told me
with tears in his eyes, we would have ‘no dreams anymore.’ The lofty flights of
our spirit would have been checked and crippled forever, and the first thing to be
consigned to the rubbish heap would be our science and technology.” In such a
situation, we would just roll up the Iron Curtain and get rid of our weapons. Jung
prefigured Ronald Reagan’s oft-cited declaration to Mikhail Gorbachev that
should alien invaders appear, our two countries would learn to get along soon
enough.

Of course the question of the reality of the saucers remained. Jung left a big
hole of possibility, a portal for the New Agers who would grab onto his ideas
years later. The notion of one thing causing another was a narrow, rationalistic
view, Jung argued, rejecting it in favor of the explanation that things happen in
synchronistic “acausal, meaningful coincidence.”

Ultimately, Jung insisted on interpreting the world as a set of symbols, not of
realities, of seeing rather than knowing, of “symbolical rumors,” of lore—dreams
of the collective unconscious. But where did the collective unconscious reside? In
the absorbed Zeitgeist of strange characters like Orfeo? In the newspapers, the
tabloids, the magazines; on the wire services; in the movies? Hadn’t The Day the
Earth Stood Still, a popular and now classic film from 1951, brought essentially
the same message as Orfeo’s “etherian” visitors? And could not print or film have
also brought that message directly to Orfeo, a couple of years before he saw the
orbs pulsating?

Besides Orfeo Angelucci, the best-known contactee at the first Saucerian
convention was George Adamski. He had fought with the cavalry down on the
border during the Pancho Villa unpleasantness. In the early thirties, he
established a Tibetan temple in Laguna Beach, one of whose virtues was that its
status as a religious institution meant dispensation from the rigors of Prohibition.

If repeal had never come, Adamski would later say in an unguarded moment, he
might never have gotten into “this saucer crap.” He moved to the slopes of Mount
Palomar and began trying to photograph the saucers. In his 1955 book, Inside the
Space Ships, he told of being taken on board flying saucers by aliens with
mythological names, and he reported that he spoke frequently to his “Space
Brothers.”

Truman Bethurum, author of the 1954 book Aboard the Flying Saucers, reported
that while laying asphalt in the desert in July 1952 he saw eight or ten small
spacemen. They took him aboard their spaceship, where he met its captain, Aura
Rhanes, a female he described as “tops in beauty,” from the planet Clarion.
Again, the burden of the message was a warning against nuclear weapons and of
the need for love.

Daniel Fry’s 1954 book, The White Sands Incident, prefigures elements of the
Roswell and Area 51 stories but with a wholly different tone. Fry worked for
Aerojet General at the White Sands rocket test site. On a remote corner of the
base, on July 4, 1950, he said, he saw a flying saucer land. From inside, a voice
belonging to a visitor called A-lan invited him for a ride to New York and back.
In 1955, Fry published A-lan’s Message to Men of Earth, this time based not on a
direct encounter but on “a voice inside my head.” Like many of the contactees, he
veered toward mysticism, and he tied the saucer tales to classic prewar
obsessions with the ancient continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. After a great
conflict between the two, Fry suggested, the survivors had fled to Mars.

There was a pattern to the lives of these contactees: Almost all had come from
the Los Angeles area—and had worked on the edge of the aeronautic industry.
Their accounts share a tone and a language. They have been taken aboard
saucers, not with the menacing experimental intent described by later abductees,
but in a naive, friendly way. The aliens are friends, “Space Brothers,” who
address the contactee as “pal.” Unlike the abductees who would dominate the
youfer lore of the 1980s and 1990s, the mood is not one of manipulation but of
wonder, even enlightenment. The ruling spirit is Klaatu, the alien in The Day the
Earth Stood Still, who has come to warn us of our own folly, specifically nuclear
folly. In some of the accounts there is an old-fashioned, almost nineteenth-
century feel, as in Van Tassel’s assertion that human beings were the result of
beautiful Venusians mating with ugly Earth apes.

Fashions in ufology apparently offer a shadow version of the wider culture. For
some the aliens are saviors, for others, invaders.

The first mystery “airships” in the 1890s arrived when the fascination with
flying machines and balloons was at its height, a time of urbanization,
immigration, and economic depression. While the first “foo fighters” of the
1940s, lights spotted by fighter pilots, were discounted as mere oddities, like the
false bogeys on crude early radar, the ghost rockets of the immediate postwar

years suggested a fear of attack from the Soviet Union.

The flying saucer craze of the late forties and early fifties—culminating
perhaps in June and July of 1952, when Washington, D.C., was “buzzed” by
multiple saucers, recorded by ground observers, radar watchers, and airline pilots
—marched along in neat parallel to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. (To the
Japanese, sociologists argued, Godzilla stood for the assault of the B-29s, their
incendiary and atomic bombs.) During the hottest period of the Cold War, the
aliens brought contactees a message of peace. But already a darker theme of
cover-up was emerging, in the charges of leading UFO propagandist Donald
Keyhoe that “silencers” were at work and the government was keeping the truth
a secret.

Race sometimes emerged as a theme of UFO stories in the sixties, and the
theme of government cover-up—a shadow of the assassinations, Vietnam, and the
Pentagon Papers—grew stronger in that decade. The national humiliations of
Watergate and Iran coincided with the cattle mutilation stories of the seventies.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind featured Francois Truffaut playing a thinking
man’s UFO expert, based on the UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, who echoed
Jung’s arguments about considering sightings on their own terms and skirted the
issue of real existence. But in the end of the movie, real saucers do appear.

Fashions in ufology changed in the eighties, when E.T. (1982) was understood
as a fable for childhood. Children, like aliens, are new to the planet, with
innocent assumptions and virtually no knowledge about how life is lived here on
Earth.

The eighties craze for abduction stories was in keeping with the cultural trends
of the rest of the decade. Its sexual and personal obsessions—I was taken because
I was special, I was abused—tied in with talk-show psychology, itself an emblem
of the times.

In the eighties, too, Stealth created its own shadow culture in the Bob Lazar
story. The F-117 looked like a flying saucer when viewed head on—and for sound
technical reasons. Ben Rich would write of the design of the fighter, “Several of
our aerodynamics experts, including Dick Cantrell, seriously thought that maybe
we would do better trying to build an actual flying saucer. The shape itself was
the ultimate in low observability. The problem was finding a way to make a
saucer fly. Unlike our plane, it would have to be rotated and spun.” This
statement was widely cited by both those merely curious about flying saucers and
those firmly convinced of their existence.

The secrecy around Stealth helped nurture rumors that it had been created
with the assistance of alien technology; one saucer organization noted that when
a still secret Stealth fighter crashed in the summer of 1986, the whole area was
cordoned off and cleaned up just as the Roswell crash and other “recoveries” had
been.

The eras of changing fascinations in the UFO culture suggest periods in fashion or
movements in art. And many of the contactee visions reminded me of what is
called outsider or visionary art. In the paintings of these socially marginal and
untrained artists—“kooks” or “loons,” in the later parlance of the Interceptors—
flying saucers appeared as frequently and naturally as angels or Jesus, or 727s
and locomotives. These artists often actually paint UFOs. Like many of the
contactees, they not only see visions but hear voices, inspiring them to paint
landscapes from other planets or construct saucer shrines, even landing pads.

Many of these images possess a dreamy, otherworldly quality, like Angelucci’s
prose, in which Tiny’s Cafe in Twenty-nine Palms turns into a magic chamber
where he sips amber. Others share the intrigue in detailed alternative engineering
and dissident cosmology with the saucer buffs, who look to Nikola Tesla and
Townsend Brown as alternate-world heroes of the technology of conspiracy.

Van Tassel’s Giant Rock “spaceport,” it turns out, was merely one of many
smaller offshoots. I came across a book that documented a world of such people
who built UFO detectors and landing sites for saucers. These were believed to be
the vehicles of angels or aliens, or both. Douglas Curran, the book’s author and
photographer, recounts that the title, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of
Outer Space, had come to him in a dream. Curran, like Jung, found that when he
tried to approach the saucer sighters and cultists as a folklorist, there were those
who still pulled him aside and earnestly asked, But do you believe? This
suggested just how close such folk cultures were to religious sects, which helps
explain the shrinelike nature of the places Curran photographed.

Sightings and imaginings, theories and conspiracies—the cultures of
Dreamland made up a folklore of its own. Did it matter whether the Aurora
airplane or the “alien replicated aircraft” actually existed, any more than whether
Hermes actually had wings on his feet? Folklore and superstition begin where
science and knowledge end. And knowing stopped at the perimeter around
Dreamland.

After reading Jung, I became more aware of patterns in the tales surrounding
Dreamland. Like UFOs, the actual existence of the flying black triangles (or bats
or rays or pumpkin seeds) was a matter of serious debate. The black-plane stories
shared a consistency of account and rough detail that made up a corpus of
experience. I came to think of it collectively as the Lore.

Today’s folklore, or the nearest thing we have to it, is bounded by technical
expertise and collective fascination. It lives in a group’s language, assumptions,
and perspective, in its prides and prejudices. Technical subcultures—sharers of
belief in a technology—are paralleled by those with a faith in conspiracy, a
hidden order. Could it not be that in an age of technological explanation it took
the unexplained to link us together? That in the age of information, it took
mystery? Shared professions and shared fascinations had replaced the shared

geography of village or town. Sometimes the cultures of technology could seem
like cults, and the mechanics of conspiracy theory could seem as complex as
science or engineering.

Both saucers and mystery planes had about them the same compulsive
gathering of bits of information, the careful construction of databases of
sightings, dimensions, aircraft specifications, and numbers. In this regard, both
groups resembled the historian Richard Hofstadter’s descriptions of conspiracy
groups who from time immemorial have built elaborate factual structures from
which to launch speculations.

John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists saw the same sort of
dynamic Carl Jung had observed among flying saucer buffs at work in the
sightings of black aircraft. “Considered as a sociological and epistemological
phenomenon, the parallels between reports of flying saucers and reports of
mystery aircraft are striking,” he wrote. If, as Jung believed, flying saucers “were
a response to the deep cultural anxieties of a society threatened with sudden
nuclear annihilation,” then couldn’t mystery aircraft be a response to economic
challenges and the decline in fortunes of the aerospace industry, whose future the
end of the Cold War had made uncertain?

“Belief in the existence of marvelously capable and highly secret aircraft
resonates with some of the deeper anxieties of contemporary American society,”
Pike went on. “Aviation has long been one of the distinguishing attributes of
American greatness, from Kitty Hawk to Desert Storm.

“It would be reassuring to believe that concealed in the most hidden recesses of
the American technostructure were devices of such miraculous capabilities that
they will astound the world when at last they are revealed and will restore
America to its rightful station of leadership.”

The saucers might save us from the Cold War; the black aircraft could save us
from its aftermath.

9. Ike’s Toothache

Not long before the Saucerian convention at Giant Rock, the president of the
United States came to nearby Palm Springs to relax. He had made the eight-hour
flight out to California on his Lockheed Constellation, named the Columbine after
a wildflower he loved from his prairie childhood. On Saturday, February 20,
1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was enjoying a golfing vacation at Smoke Tree
Ranch as the guest of golf partners Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the Studebaker
Corporation, George Allen, an insurance CEO, and Paul Helms, president of the
Helms Baking Company. He rose early, met the press at eight-thirty to announce
he had signed twenty-three bills, and made comments supporting his nominee for
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. He spent the day playing golf.
But that evening, after dinner, Ike disappeared.

One can easily imagine the press corps, happy for some time out of the
Washington winter, sitting around their Saturday night card game in the nearby
Mirador Hotel and getting irked when Eisenhower did not return from dinner as
scheduled. Could he have had a heart attack? Was a world crisis brewing? What
one correspondent would call “journalistic mob hysteria” seized the press when
Merriman Smith of the U.P. dispatched an alarming report that the president had
been taken away for “medical treatment.” The rival A.P. took it another step: The
president was dead, it declared in a hastily retracted bulletin.

James Haggerty, the press secretary, was called out to make an explanatory
statement. The wild rumors were quickly put to rest. “During [the president’s]
evening meal, the porcelain cap on one of his front teeth chipped off,” The New
York Times reported. “Mr. Helms took him to Dr. F. A. Purcell, a dentist, who
replaced the cap. When the president goes to church tomorrow morning, his grin
will look the same as ever.”

The reporters grumbled about a toothache being turned into an international
crisis, but during the hours of Eisenhower’s absence, a legend was born: The Lore
would record that he was secretly flown to Muroc, soon to be Edwards Air Force
Base, to meet with aliens and view recovered flying saucers. Eisenhower’s dental
mishap, like the crumb of cheese that grows into Scrooge’s nightmares, would
grow into a whole fabric of conspiracy theories that will eventually end up in
Dreamland.

The next morning Eisenhower took his wife and mother-in-law to the Palm
Springs Community Church, his repaired grin inspiring crowds to political-rally
warmth. In the sanctuary, the minister praised Ike and Mamie’s spiritual
example, their witness to Christian principles and religious conviction. One

aspect of his religiosity was that Ike did not play golf on Sundays.

Had Ike made that trip, met those aliens, could the grin indeed have looked the
same as ever? It must have been a moment of profound philosophical
reexamination for the former general. According to one account, the aliens “kept
disappearing, causing him embarrassment.” Did he wonder where to focus his
attentive gaze, his welcoming remarks? Could this man have indeed disappeared
between dinner and breakfast to view hidden saucers and meet with aliens and
then sailed off to listen happily to that sermon?

The idea of a trip to Muroc is hard to buy. The president would have had to fly
to leave himself any significant amount of time at the base. He would have lost a
lot of sleep.

The legend of “Ike’s toothache” was established in UFO lore as a result of a letter
written in April 1954 by Gerald Light to Meade Layne. No one has much of an
idea who Light was, beyond the fact that he was an adherent of a spiritualist
organization called the Borderlands Foundation, founded in 1945 by Layne to
explore “realms normally beyond the range of basic human perception and
physical measurement.” Publishing works by Charles Steinmetz and The Etheric
Formative Forces in Cosmos , Earth and Man by Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth,
Borderlands was dedicated to investigations of “ether ships,” Vril energy,
radionics, and dowsing. It stood somewhere between the Theosophist groups then
influential in Los Angeles and today’s New Age groups. Layne himself had written
on the saucers, which he called “ether ships” or “aeroforms,” tying them to the
Kabala and other mystical writings.

Light’s letter has become a classic of the Lore, a record of suspicion emerging
from enthusiasm, excitement mingling with dread.

My Dear Friend—

I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true—devastatingly true!

I made the journey in company with Franklin Allen of the Hearst papers and
Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute and Bishop MacIntyre of LA (confidential
names, for the present, please).

When we were allowed to enter the restricted section (after about six hours
in which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident, and aspect
of our personal and public lives), I had the distinct feeling that the world had
come to an end with fantastic realism. For I have never seen so many human
beings in a state of complete collapse and confusion as they realized that their
own world had indeed ended with such finality as to beggar description. The
reality of “otherplane” aeroforms is now and forever removed from the realms
of speculation and made a rather painful part of the consciousness of every
responsible scientific and political group.

During his two-day visit, Light went on, he saw five different types of aircraft

“with the assistance and permission of the Etherians.”

The notion that he would have been included with such well-known figures as
the Hearst columnist and the bishop is self-congratulatory, and the tone is a
strange combination of sermonly seriousness and offhand weirdness:

President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc
one night during his visit to Palm Springs recently.

Mental and emotional pandemonium is now shattering the consciousness of
hundreds of our scientific “authorities.”

“Pity” was what he felt watching “the pathetic bewilderment of rather brilliant
brains struggling to make some sort of rational explanation.” For himself, he said,
he had long ago entered “the metaphysical woods.”

I had forgotten how commonplace such things as the dematerialization of
“solid” objects had become to my own mind. The coming and going of an
etheric, or spirit, body has been so familiar to me these many years I had just
forgotten that such a manifestation could snap the mental balance of a man not
so conditioned.

Light’s letter reads like the most clever sort of propagandist document—one
whose real message is oblique. While designed to be read by someone outside, it
speaks as an insider: Light would not have to define “etheric” for his pal Meade
Layne (a name smarmy enough for a character from a Chandler novel). He drops
the names of his companions (an unlikely bunch) and describes a thoroughgoing
background check that only someone unfamiliar with the military could imagine.
Such signs mark his letter as an effort to shift the discussion of flying saucers into
the territory of the Borderlands and other spiritualist groups. The flying objects
were not from Mars or Zeta Reticuli but from a “higher plane,” “a different
dimension.”

The leaps of speculation implicit in references to Eisenhower’s “secret trip” slip
in almost unnoticed. Thus uncertainty or secrecy mutates into fantasy: If the
president catches cold, the stock market may get pneumonia; if the president has
a heart attack, the whole Cold War balance trembles. When the president got a
chipped tooth, in this year of maximum danger, consternation ensued. From a
tiny chip, a crevasse of speculation could grow.

But it was too late for the conspiracists to be disarmed. The first few months after
their advent in 1947 was probably the last time that an air of open-mindedness
about flying saucers was sustained. The lines of opposition had not yet hardened
between private researchers and government. The Air Force, just established as
an independent service, had not grown disgusted with the question. Fear had not
yet overwhelmed curiosity. A variety of ideas were in play, and speculation was
neither stifled nor rampant. Theories of government cover-up had yet to take
root. The question, in short, was still open.

On September 23, Gen. Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Air
Materiel Command at Wright Field, wrote a secret memo to Brig. Gen. George
Schulgen, chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division at the Pentagon,
about the flying saucer question.

Twining’s memo offered what seems a reasonable and open-minded listing of
possible explanations for the UFOs: They are a secret U.S. craft, or a secret Soviet
system, perhaps developed with the aid of German scientists (shades of future
theories). They are an unexplained meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon,
or—and this was not ruled out—craft from another star system. Indeed, he
added, “It is the considered opinion of some elements that the object may in fact
represent an interplanetary craft of some kind.

“The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” Twining
concluded, in words that would be cited again and again. There was
recommendation for further study and a suggestion, later explicitly rejected for
reasons of cost, that interceptor fighters be kept on alert to shoot down UFOs.

In December 1947, the Air Force set up Project Sign to track the saucers and
other UFOs and determine their nature. But in 1949 the name was changed to
Project Grudge, an unconscious symbol that the attitude of the Air Force had
quickly turned to irritation. It hated dealing with the UFO problem, the press, the
watchers, the nuts. It was uncomfortable with the notion that objects might be
able to fly so easily through its air defenses. It felt disarmed dealing in areas
where hard evidence was hard to get. Most of all, it wanted to be rid of the
problem. The Air Force, a joke had it, wished the saucers swam instead of flew so
that they would become the Navy’s problem.

In 1948, a report of Project Sign, called “Estimate of the Situation,” was
completed. Neither chief of staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg nor Twining found it
acceptable. Deciding that the evidence did not support the conclusions,
Vandenberg ordered it destroyed, and the “Estimate” was not made public. Years
later, when UFO researchers asked for a copy, neither the military nor the
civilian agencies could or were willing to provide one. This lapse would be cited
in support of the argument that there was a cover-up. Quotations ostensibly from
the never-issued document made reference to descriptions of material that
sounded a lot like the Roswell wreckage, which believers saw as proof that the
Roswell recovery had been part of a cover-up, that the stuff was indeed pieces of
a saucer, and that Air Force units were being asked to be on the alert for similar
incidents and objects. The cries of cover-up would soon be a dominant note in
the debate over UFOs. In January 1950, True magazine published the famous
Donald Keyhoe story that charged the government with a cover-up of the truth
about the saucers. “Estimate of the Situation” would become legendary and leave
a legacy of suspicion.

Keyhoe published a book-length argument, The Flying Saucers Are Real, in 1950
and soon began to speak of “silencers,” Air Force officers or other government

agents intimidating witnesses to keep the truth secret. He followed up with The
Flying Saucer Conspiracy in 1955.

The strand of the Lore charging cover-up and conspiracy spun off from that of
the happy contactees almost immediately. An early and recurrent part of it were
the “Men in Black.” Here one could clearly see folklore crystallizing from real
events.

It began with a plane crash, like a science fiction film I remembered from
childhood—was it Target Earth ? A B-26 crashes, and marks in the dirt indicate the
movement of an invisible creature. Suddenly, a dead aviator shudders back to life
and begins a zombielike walk—a military man possessed by an alien force.

In July 1947, Fred Lee Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, two men from Tacoma,
Washington, who claimed to be harbor patrolmen, reported that they had seen a
group of doughnut-shaped UFOs near Maury Island and had gathered scraps of
one that had crashed. There were intriguing details: Their radio was jammed and
strange spots appeared on photographs they took. And a mysterious man in black
drove up in a black Buick and told them to keep quiet.

The Air Force dispatched its top flying saucer investigators, Lt. Frank Brown
and Capt. William Davidson from the TID—Technical Intelligence Division. They
determined that the whole story was a hoax. But when their B-25 bomber
crashed on their return home, suspicions immediately arose that someone was
hushing things up. The Tacoma newspaper headlined the story sabotage suspected.

A book by Gray Barker called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers was
published in 1956 and established the Men in Black legend firmly in the Lore. In
1952, Barker claimed, a man named Albert K. Bender organized a UFO group
called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Within months, Bender was visited
by MiBs who told him that the government knew and would soon reveal the
truth. They persuaded him to dissolve his organization.

In just a few years, the Men in Black story took on detail and showed all the
mutability of a traditional folktale. The Tacoma Buick was upgraded in many
versions to a black Cadillac. These Men in Black often dressed too warmly; they
walked and talked mechanically; they had vaguely Asian features. They could
have been aliens themselves, even robots. To folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz, they
suggested the ominous dark men or evil tricksters found in many folk traditions.

The story took a new twist in 1980 when Lowell Cunningham, hearing of the
legend in casual conversation, was inspired to create a humorous comic-book
version of the tale. It underwent a further twist when the comic book became the
basis for a screenplay and, in 1997, a hit film, Men in Black.

Neither Cunningham nor Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the film, had heard of
Crisman and Dahl or Gray Barker or any of the origins of the MiB myth. Knowing
it only as an urban legend, they felt free to extemporize on it and the film

provided a darkly comic rendition of what had begun as sinister. The film was
another play on the alien immigrant/alien life-form pun, and the cinematic Men
in Black were urbanized agents belonging to a sort of intergalactic Immigration
and Naturalization Service. They provided the great service of keeping us safe
and happy in our ignorance of the alien presence. 1

The camou dudes at Area 51 were in some sense imaginative relatives of the
Men in Black. Their danger was overestimated; they took on an almost folkloric
quality of menace. Sometimes they inhabited the dreams of watchers, like
modern-day Greek Furies. So when Gene Huff talked about his feelings of fear
and guilt after visiting the perimeter with Lazar, he talked about “the Dream
Police”—police in his mind. The camou dudes, like the mysteries of Area 51
itself, came at the end of a long tradition—a legacy of fear. They were shadows
of very old figures of menace, just as the mysteries of Area 51 itself touched
almost primal fears of the unknown.

10. Paradise Ranch

For Curtis LeMay, 1954 was the year of “maximum danger,” the year he believed
the Soviets would have more than enough bombs and bombers to hit us and we
wouldn’t yet have enough of the silver bombers he thought the United States
needed to strike back. For the country at large, it was a year of fear—the depth of
Cold War paranoia, the high-water mark of McCarthyism. The greatest fear was
of surprise attack, an atomic Pearl Harbor. President Eisenhower feared a surprise
attack too, a lack of intelligence like the one that had nearly cost him his
reputation at the Battle of the Bulge. If LeMay had seemed eager to start World
War III, there were others in 1954 who began creating an airplane that could
prevent it.

Out of a sense of near national emergency—a desperate desire to see what was
going on inside the Soviet Union—the U-2 spy plane was developed. In July
1954, Ike had created the Killian Committee, chaired by MIT president James
Killian, and including leading lights of the scientific community as well as
military figures, to decide what to do about the danger of atomic surprise attack.
Relying heavily on work by the RAND corporation, its report came in the
autumn. One of its key recommendations was the development of some sort of
aerial reconnaissance to establish the state of Soviet weaponry.

Major Seaberg’s “Bald Eagle” proposal for a high-flying spy plane was brought
out of the files; aviation contractors were quietly asked for ideas. Among their
proposals was one for a Mach 4 plane launched from the back of a fast B-58
bomber. Another called for a ramjet aircraft to be carried to high altitude by a
huge balloon, then released. Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunk Works
proposed putting long wings on the fuselage of his F-104 Starfighter—and, he
promised, he could do it quickly.

To Edwin Land of Polaroid, a key member of the Killian group, the Skunk
Works proposal, called the CL-282, seemed the most practical and potentially the
fastest way to put cameras over the Soviet Union. On November 5, 1954, Land
wrote a memo to CIA director Allen Dulles called “A Unique Opportunity for
Comprehensive Intelligence,” pushing the Lockheed idea.

No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so
quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.

We have been forced to imagine what [the Soviet] program is, and it could
well be argued that peace is always in danger when one great power is
essentially ignorant of the major economic, military, and political
activities ... of another great power ... We cannot fulfill our responsibility for

maintaining the peace if we are left in ignorance of Russian activities.

He made another key point: Such a program was also vital in order to avoid
“over-estimation” of the enemy—as dangerous as its opposite.

Land was persuasive and obtained Eisenhower’s approval. By December 1954,
Kelly Johnson had in his hand a contract to produce twenty of the planes for $22
million—all within nine months. The CIA would foot the bill from discretionary
—and very much unaccounted for—funds. And it, not the Air Force, would take
charge of the project, code-named Aquatone.

Soon a strange figure began to be seen in the shops and offices of the Skunk
Works. A tall, stooped man, he inevitably reminded observers of a stork. No one
introduced this odd Easterner—anyone at Lockheed could tell that he was from
back East, so out of place was he inside the yellow hangars in Burbank—except
occasionally he was referred to simply as “Mr. B.” He would look even more out
of place later on the caliche runway at the base at Groom Lake.

Mr. B. was Richard Bissell, a former Yale economics professor who now headed
up Aquatone.

Bissell had grown up in comparative privilege in Hartford, Connecticut, where
his family owned Mark Twain’s old house. “It was a world unto itself,” he would
recall, full of odd rooms, secret closets, and private balconies—a happy psychic
conditioning, perhaps, for the hidden chambers of the intelligence establishment
he was to join. As a child he once tossed his teddy bear off the fantail of the
Queen Mary and ordered his nanny to retrieve it. As a teenager, he looked out on
the Colosseum and the ruins of the Forum and meditated on the nature of
empire.

After Groton and Yale, where he turned down admission to Skull and Bones
and became an America Firster, dedicated to keeping the country out of the
mounting European conflict, he went on to graduate school. He turned to
government just in time to become a key figure in one of the unsung but vital
logistics battles of World War II. While U-boats roamed in wolfpacks preying on
Allied shipping, and the codebreakers back in England labored to defeat them
without tipping their hands, Bissell almost single-handedly ran the Allied
merchant shipping program. Using a complex system of file cards, he figured out
how to turn ships around fast, and what to fill their limited holds with—bombs
or oil or coal—and how to get fruit and tea to London. After the war, he drafted
the initial proposal for the Marshall Plan.

In Washington after the war, Bissell’s imperial thoughts found congenial
territory. Dean Acheson has compared the face-off between the United States and
the Soviet Union to that between Rome and Carthage. Bissell quickly became part
of the influential Georgetown cocktail party set, gathering over martinis to
discuss affairs of state with the Rostows and the Alsops, the Grahams—Kate and

Phil of The Washington Post —and the Dulleses—John Foster, Ike’s secretary of
state, Eleanor, a State Department expert in Asian affairs, and Allen, the head of
the CIA.

Bissell returned to academia, then moved to the Ford Foundation. When life
there grew dull, he gently dropped a hint to Allen Dulles that he might consider
work at the agency. He was one of the new generation of logistics and technology
experts, the technocrats, who came out of the war effort—for World War II had
been a war of logistics. While Henry Stimson, Republican secretary of state, the
epitome of WASP privilege, had shut down the famed Black Chamber in 1929,
saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” the coming of World War II
had made it necessary for gentlemen to spy, and to fight dirty. The OSS, a
precursor of the CIA, had first brought college men into espionage, and, after its
founding in 1947, an Ivy League-educated cadre ran the service. The plots to get
rid of Castro that would shock a nation when they were revealed at the Church
Hearings in 1973 were like others of the era. The OSS and CIA had come up with
wacky schemes before, such as dropping pornographic literature on
Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat, to drive him mad with lust.

After World War II, the Yale crew coach Skip Waltz was the chief recruiter. A
few measured words at the boathouse to a team player, a suggestion in
confidence, brought dozens of oarsmen into the CIA. But if many of the Ivy
League recruits had been “well rounded,” promising men of action, Bissell was
unusual—an academic, who came to the agency from a foundation. Bissell liked
systems, flow charts, tables. He was the champion of the coming thing in
intelligence—technology, photint, elint—and it would sometimes put him in
conflict with the traditionalists—the humint people. He would take little interest
in the actual content of the pictures the U-2 or SR-71 would take.

Bissell was most interested in the psychology of CIA operations, the
manipulation of public opinion, the creation of illusory forces rather than the use
of actual weapons.

He would argue in his memoirs that the U-2 served as a psychological weapon
as well as a reconnaissance tool. It sowed the crucial idea that the United States
could overfly the Soviet Union with impunity. Responding to the humiliation
their military felt at having been so brazenly overflown, the Soviets insisted they
had shot down the plane at 70,000 feet with a single antiaircraft missile. In fact,
they likely fired a huge salvo of the missiles and may have even knocked one of
their own fighters out of the sky.

Bissell’s first success came with the overthrow in 1954 of Guatemalan dictator
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. That, along with the replacement of Mosaddeq in Iran
with the shah, were the CIA’s proudest achievements. Accomplished at the behest
not just of the president but of the United Fruit Company, the Guatemala
operation set the CIA on the course of exotic “covert,” “destabilizing” operations.

Significantly, to Bissell’s thinking, the operation turned not on military force
but on illusion, such as bogus radio transmissions reporting gathering rebel forces
—a twist on the old wartime deception of a few soldiers walking repeatedly back
and forth along a wall to suggest to an enemy many more soldiers. The rebel air
force was a couple of old P-51s that Bissell had arranged to have the Nicaraguan
dictator Anastasio Somoza buy and lease out for cover. When real bombs ran out,
the planes dropped Coke bottles that emitted a sinister whistle. This was the
perfect symbol of American intervention circa 1954: the Coca-Cola bottle as
bomb, bringing with it American-style fear and intimidation.

Success in Guatemala lent the CIA a sense of false confidence that would
ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Barely a year later, in the fall of 1955, Allen Dulles called in Bissell, who had
been with the agency only briefly, and out of the blue gave him the job of
running Aquatone.

Dulles, catlike with his whiskery mustache, tweedy and academic, puffing on
his pipe, looked his role. But he was a master bureaucrat. The director had
already gotten the Air Force to cover his ass with a letter saying that, indeed, the
absurdly optimistic schedule Kelly Johnson proposed for the U-2 was realistic.

While Johnson was building the airplane, the Harvard astronomer James Baker
directed the development of special cameras. They would carry 10,000 feet of
film on each flight and be able to photograph a swath of territory 125 miles wide
and 3,000 miles long.

But they all knew it was only a matter of time before Soviet antiaircraft
missiles could reach the maximum altitude of 70,000 feet or so and make the U-2
vulnerable. Even while the U-2 was being tested, Bissell planned the plane that
became the Blackbird to fly higher and faster, and in 1958 he began to develop
the first spy satellite, Corona.

Work on the new plane continued in Lockheed’s Building 82 at the Burbank
Airport. The first flight was scheduled for August 1955. Kelly Johnson knew who
he wanted to fly it first—Tony LeVier, his top test pilot. But first he had to find a
place from which to fly it.

He knew they could not test the U-2 at Edwards. By 1954, that base had
become too public, and this was a project so secret that its treasury was
Johnson’s own home mailbox, in Encino, and its cover firm called C&J Inc. (from
Clarence Johnson, his given name).

One day in the spring of 1955, Johnson and LeVier set out in the company’s
Beech Bonanza to look for a test site. To disguise their purpose, they wore
hunting clothes and took off in the direction of Mexico carrying a huge lunch
LeVier’s wife had prepared. They crisscrossed dozens of little airstrips and
disused bases. Then finally Osmond Ritland, the CIA’s military aide to the

program, remembered a strip in the gunnery range where he had been stationed
during the war in the desert north of Nellis Air Force Base. With the map spread
over Johnson’s lap, they aimed for the little x, north of the vast Nevada Test Site.
“We looked at that lake,” Ritland would later recall, “and we all looked at each
other. It was another Edwards, so we wheeled around, landed on that lake, taxied
up to one end of it, and Kelly Johnson said, ‘We’ll build it right there, that’s the
hangar. We’ll put the runway there.’ ”

The lake was covered with sagebrush. Wild burros occasionally ventured across
it. With an old Air Force compass in hand, kicking away the spent .50-caliber
shell casings, Johnson laid out the strip. “This will be the tower, right here,” he
said. Pebbles the size of peas blew around in the afternoon winds.

Soon, seventy-five people would be working here, paving the runway, building
hangars, and setting up mobile homes bought from the Navy as barracks. By the
time training started, the number of workers jumped to 250. The U-2s were flown
in on cargo planes, their wings removed. An official CIA history rather prissily
explains, “The site at first afforded few of the necessities and none of the
amenities of life.”

They flew Bissell out to the site. “Sweet Jesus,” Mr. B. may have exclaimed, a
favorite phrase of his.

“This will do nicely,” he commented. He even liked Johnson’s proposed name
for the place: “Paradise Ranch.”

Johnson and Bissell worked it out such that the Nevada Test Site took official
ownership of the strip. Construction on the runway began and a press release was
issued, tying the work to the test site, when work began in August. It was done
by REECO, Reynolds Electric, the subsidiary of EG&G that ran the nuclear test
site. It was referred to now as “Watertown Strip”—perhaps a coy reference to the
dryness of the place, or to Allen Dulles’s hometown in northern New York State—
and not Groom Lake in the emerging cover story, which described the airplane as
a weather craft.

Meanwhile, a continent away, the command post for the program was set up in
the E-ring of the Pentagon. Bissell moved out of the CIA headquarters on the Mall
and into a special program management office with a staff of 225 in an old office
on L Street—one of the temporary wartime buildings that had never been
removed, an apt metaphor for the survival of the wartime mentality into the
uneasy peace. The place was named “Bissell Center,” and some in the agency
began talking of the RBAF—“Richard Bissell Air Force.”

The photo-processing center was set up in a seedy part of town at K and Fifth
streets, NW, on four floors above offices of the Stuart Motor Car Company, an
auto repair shop. It was code-named Automat.

Aircraft ferried workers and materials between the Skunk Works in Burbank and

another factory, set up in the little town of Oildale near Bakersfield, a scruffy
cotton and oil town where the country singer Merle Haggard had grown up in an
old boxcar. The pilots flying to the new secret base were not told where it was.
They were simply ordered to fly to a set of coordinates in the middle of the desert
and then to await instructions from an unknown air control center, called Sage
Control, for further instructions from “Delta.” At the point when the radar picked
them up, the crews were ordered to descend into the dark desert and lower their
gears and flaps. Only then did the runway lights flicker on beneath them.

Between flights, those working at the base lived four to a trailer and could
contact families only if absolutely necessary. The phone for this purpose was
called the “hello” phone, because that was the only way it was to be answered. It
became a fixture of black projects. The number was given out for use only in
emergencies. A message was left and the worker or engineer would call back.

There was much drinking and poker. With lots of idle time on their hands, one
group of workers fired off homemade rockets made of sawdust, gunpowder, and
cigar tubes. Once they nearly hit a cargo plane.

On November 17, 1955, a C-54 making the run from Burbank mistook its
altitude and struck Mount Charleston, northwest of Las Vegas, just thirty feet
short of its peak. It took three days for a rescue party to reach the crash; an Air
Force colonel picked through the wreckage removing briefcases with classified
documents. The Skunk Works was lucky; some of its key people had missed the
flight because of overindulgence at a beer bash the night before.

Curtis LeMay didn’t like the idea of a bunch of civilians running an airplane
program. But Eisenhower felt with equal certainty that he needed a less biased
source of intelligence than the Air Force, which had a record of exaggerating the
threat to keep its bomber budgets generous. Protecting himself and the American
taxpayer from the military was as important a function of the U-2 program as
was protecting us from the Soviet Union. LeMay’s deputy, Tom Powers, was
flown to the Watertown camp in 1955 and briefed. In the deal that was worked
out, SAC would “sheep-dip” the pilots—moving them from military to civilian
status and training them. The base now had Air Force and CIA co-commanders.

LeMay carefully planned on letting the agency build the U-2 but then to take it
away on behalf of SAC. The Skunk Works and the agency, however, worked to
build their own credibility and went over LeMay’s head. In December 1955,
Secretary of Defense Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson was flown to the site to
bolster his enthusiasm for the program. He talked from the tower to a U-2 pilot
high above. Later, Allen Dulles, pipe and all, dropped in to chat with the pilots-
in-training.

The Atomic Energy Commission covered the construction work with a brief
statement about the building of the airstrip, suggesting it was for nuclear testing
activities, and later the familiar weather research cover story was put to work

again. On May 7, 1956, a press release was issued over the name of NACA
director Hugh Dryden announcing that the new weather research plane had been
developed and flown. “The first data, covering conditions in the Rocky Mountain
area, are being obtained from flights from Watertown Strip, Nevada.” This fooled
few people; the Soviets had a copy of it when they shot down U-2 pilot Gary
Powers.

At the same time, a long-planned press visit to the X-15 rocket plane at
Edwards was hastily expanded to include a look at a “NACA” U-2, which had to
be moved from the secretive North Base section of the flight test complex and
painted up; it was given a bogus tail number. The paint wasn’t even dry when the
reporters entered the hangar, and the ground crew was terrified one of the
reporters would get close enough to touch the plane. Photos of the weather U-2
look retouched, with the NACA initials in a band on the tail.

At four-thirty on the morning of July 14, 1955, the U-2 was loaded on a C-124
and flown to Nevada. By August 4, it had been assembled and was ready to fly.

Test pilot Tony LeVier, who had chosen as his code name for the project
“Anthony Evans,” was forty-two, at the top of a career wringing out the P-38 for
Lockheed and then flying the first Skunk Works airplane, the XP-80 jet. He was
fourteen when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, and he’d immediately begun
earning money collecting old tires and other junk in his Whittier, California,
neighborhood, paying five dollars for his first airplane ride. Beginning with the
Waco 10, in which he soloed three years later, LeVier would fly more than 250
different aircraft. By the time he came to Lockheed in 1941, he was already well
known as a stunt and aerobatics pilot. He flew such exotic craft as the
Mendenhall Special from Muroc Dry Lake in 1936 and won major trophy races in
1938 in a craft called the Schoenfeldt Firecracker.

At Lockheed, he immediately helped to figure out the odd high-speed
compression problem of the P-38—a precursor of the shock waves at the sound
barrier—and would put in more hours in its cockpit than any other test pilot. In
June 1944 he made the first flight in the XP-80, and then flew its successor, the
XP-80A “Gray Ghost”—of all the planes he flew, the one that he said came closest
to killing him.

In March 1945, LeVier pushed the jet past 550 miles per hour when a turbine
blade let go and he found himself embarrassed by the sudden lack of a tail. The
plane began to tumble, and with the G’s he could barely reach the canopy release
handle. When he did, it came off in his hand. Reaching behind the seat he
grabbed the raw cable. Finally, the plane turned over and dumped him out and
he pulled himself up into a little ball, waiting for what was left of the airplane to
strike him. At just 3,000 feet he managed to get his parachute open.

Yet for all the near escapes and the flamboyance, LeVier developed into the
most scientific and cautious of test pilots. He was not a wild-eyed Yeager type,

but was obsessed with safety. He had seen too many guys go in. In his retirement
he would establish an organization to teach better, safer flying practices and was
constantly frustrated with the lack of support he got from government and
industry. He developed such practical and basic safety devices as the master
warning light system, the trim switch on the control stick, and the afterburner
igniter.

With the U-2, LeVier would take no more risks than necessary. It was hard to
see out of the cockpit and hard to get a sense of horizon; he wanted the landing
strip painted with markings, but the penny-pinching Kelly Johnson found the
four-hundred-dollar expenditure excessive. Finally LeVier himself put strips of
black electrical tape on the canopy to indicate the true horizon.

U-2—“Utility 2”—was the innocuous and noncommittal tag for the plane. But
another story circulated about the source of the name.

The plane’s long wings gave it so much lift that it was hard to land. The first
flight happened by accident: LeVier took it out for a taxi test, but the airplane
took off. “It went up like a homesick angel,” LeVier said later, more for quotation
than anything else. “It flies like a baby buggy.” The only problem was it didn’t
want to come down. In the C-47 chase plane, Johnson kept after LeVier to land
nose down, but the plane kept porpoising—it would get down into ground effect,
the area where the proximity of the ground added to its lift, and begin a forward
and aft wiggle, the “porpoise.” After five or six tries, and mounting tempers on
both sides, LeVier came in and did it the way he wanted to in the first place—he
stalled the plane to get it on the ground.

Once they were both down, Johnson and LeVier continued to argue. “What the
hell were you trying to do, kill me?” LeVier said. He gave Johnson the finger.
“Well, fuck you.”

“And fuck you, too,” Johnson replied.

The “you, too” attached itself to the airplane. Or so the tale goes.

Within minutes of the landing, a heavy rain began, the first in months, the
equivalent of the lake’s total annual rainfall.

That night there was a big beer bash and the arm wrestling that Kelly, proud of
the arm strength he had acquired putting up the wall laths during his youth,
always fostered. “You did a great job,” he told LeVier, calmed down now. When
they arm-wrestled, Johnson took LeVier down right away.

The next morning, LeVier appeared with his arm bandaged, wanting to make
the point that Johnson had injured his chief test pilot. But Johnson remembered
nothing of the night before.

The project was variously termed “Aquatone” or “Idealist,” but for a long time
the plane was just referred to as “the Article,” as in the military phrase “test

article.” Soon some of the Skunk Works folks were referring to it as “Kelly’s
Angel.”

After a character in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, it was later
nicknamed “Dragon Lady.” Terry and the Dragon Lady were erstwhile enemies
who had become tenuous friends as the Cold War brought hostility between
Taiwan and mainland China. The reference suggested the uneasy relationship
between the pilot and the tricky airplane that was the triumph of Kelly Johnson’s
Skunk Works—the first example of the new kinds of weapons the Cold War
demanded.

To take off, the U-2 wore long, drop-off wheels on its wing tips—“pogo sticks,”
they were called—and one pilot said they made the aircraft look like a vulture on
crutches. That was the right image: The U-2 was delicate and shifty to fly. It
would kill several men at the Ranch before it ever went overseas.

With a skin just 2 /ioo of an inch thick, the plane’s aerodynamics left only a tiny

window between overspeeding and stalling. Its fuel could shift suddenly and
throw it off balance, its engines were prone to flaming out, and its wings were so
long they could snap with sudden maneuvers.

After the training operation was moved from the Ranch to Laughlin Air Force
Base in Del Rio, Texas, in June 1957, one eager young pilot decided to fly his
plane over his house to show off; he banked, dipped his wings, then stalled and
crashed. He died in front of his family.

In early 1956, a pilot suffered a flameout over Tennessee and radioed back.
Using a procedure set in place, where sealed envelopes had been left at selected
SAC bases for just this eventuality, Bissell had the pilot directed to Kirtland AFB
in Albuquerque. Then Bissell phoned the base commander and told him that in
about forty-five minutes a secret plane would be landing at his field and he
should immediately cover it and phone for further instructions. A half hour later
Bissell got word that all had gone as planned. The U-2 had that much glide range.

What Frank Powers remembered about Watertown, as he knew the airstrip at
Dreamland, was the food. There wasn’t much to do—a movie at night, a couple
of pool tables, no bar, no club. He looked forward to getting back to Burbank on
the weekends and the return from his new identity: from “Francis G. Palmer”
back to Francis Gary Powers.

But the food was excellent. It was better food than in Turkey, where Powers
was to be stationed—better food, to be sure, than in Lubyanka or Vladimir
prisons, where he would be faced with fish soup, endless rations of potatoes, and,
once a week, the highlight of the fare, a cube of meat the size of a thumbnail.

After his U-2 was shot down on May 1, 1960, Powers thought back to the food
at the Ranch, as he called it, just as he had learned to refer to the CIA as “the

company,” or “the government.” Before his release, he would lie on his cot,
dreaming almost nightly of banana splits and coconut cream pies, hamburgers
and green salads. Once, he argued with his cellmates about whether we dream in
color or only in black-and-white. He resolved the argument that night. He had a
dream that he clearly remembered was in color—a banquet of food and wine.
Before he could taste any of it, he woke up.

Powers came to the Ranch in the spring of 1956, in the second class of pilots to
be trained to fly the U-2. The week before, another pilot had bought it in the first
U-2 to crash. In September 1956, Howard Carey, a pilot friend of Powers’s from
the Ranch, was killed in Europe after a couple of curious Canadian interceptors
zoomed by his U-2 for a closer look. The wake of the fighters tore the spy plane
apart.

Powers had been excited about the boldness and daring of the U-2 scheme
from the moment he had heard of it. Like many, he felt that the United States
had stalled the Cold War after “the stalemate and compromise in Korea.” He
already had a top-secret clearance: At Sandia Air Base in New Mexico, in 1953,
he had gone through training for delivering nuclear weapons.

At the Ranch, he noted the miles of uninhabited land surrounding the little
strip; in the airplane, which needed only a thousand feet of runway to soar into
the sky, he enjoyed a feeling that he called a special aloneness.

The Skunk Works would cite the numbers forever after: It had taken just eighty-
eight days to produce a prototype, eight months to fly the first plane, and now
eighteen months to provide an operational spy craft. Overflights of the Soviet
Union began in July 1956. The first go-ahead was for just ten days of flying.
Eisenhower was leery, despite the promise of Bissell and others that Soviet
missiles would never reach the U-2.

Soon it was clear that the whole thing had paid off. The pilots looked for
bombers and missiles, tracked nuclear tests with filter paper that recorded the
products of the explosions, even flew through clouds of fallout. They monitored
and recorded radar and telemetry frequencies, and they actually learned a lot
about the weather over the Soviet Union, their cover story.

When the first photos came back, Eisenhower and Dulles spread them on the
floor of the Oval Office and looked at them with glee. The airplane discovered
untold intelligence riches. In July 1955, the Soviets had shown off a mass of new
bombers at their annual Aviation Day parade, and the bomber gap was born.
Now, one U-2 pilot had found a base with thirty Bison bombers on the tarmac—
was this evidence of a major buildup? Additional flights showed that this was the
only base where the Bison bombers were stationed; it was the entire fleet. The
bomber gap closed. Eisenhower was able to keep Curt LeMay’s demands for more
B-52s and the B-70 in check. Richard Bissell’s friend the columnist Joe Alsop

would later leak word of the operation to the public.

Another flight revealed the space facility at Tyuratum, the Cape Canaveral of
Russia. A third flight located a tower that looked like a nuclear test facility. The
CIA scoffed, but two days later an explosion was recorded at the previously
unknown facility. Additionally, the U-2 found evidence of new radar facilities
that made it—and successor airplanes—even more vulnerable to detection.

The U-2’s most secret flights, however, were not over Soviet airspace. They
were the ones that spied on the English and French and Israelis, beginning with
the Suez Crisis in 1956. From them, Eisenhower learned that the French and the
Israelis had lied to him—that they had many more Mirage fighters than they had
acknowledged. And after the fighting began, one U-2 did two passes over Cairo
West airport in a couple of hours, capturing the before and after images of a
bombing attack.

Officials had figured on getting two years out of the U-2. By 1960, they had
gotten four. But the Soviets were tracking the flights on radar, as they had been
almost from the beginning, and their surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were getting
closer. The president often ordered the flight plans changed or the flights
delayed. It drove the agency and the Skunk Works people crazy. They called Ike
“Speedy Gonzales.”

The last flight, called “Grand Slam” because it would fly all the way across the
Soviet Union, south to north, was approved for late April.

Weather delayed the flight. The unit shipped from Turkey to Pakistan, where
the flights operated from temporary setups. The scheduled airplane, which had
the best record, turned out to be due for maintenance; instead, Powers got
number 360, a known “dog.” (The planes were basically built by hand and
tended to have individual differences and eccentricities. Some were sturdy
performers, others plagued with gremlins. Flying out of Atsugi, the Japanese U-2
base, 360 had once made an embarrassingly public crash-landing on a muddy
airstrip, where armed guards chased off a crowd of camera-toting Japanese.)

The plane was constantly developing new and different technical maladies.
During Powers’s flight, the autopilot quickly began to go on the blink. Tracking
Powers, the Soviet military launched a salvo of SAMs. Nine miles above the
earth, Powers was writing in his logbook when he saw an orange flash.

His first thought was “I’m done for.” Then the wings went and the fuselage
began spinning. Powers’s legs were pinned against the panel by the force. He
couldn’t eject, or his legs would be taken off above the knee. He decided to
scramble out of the cockpit but found himself held in by his oxygen lines. He
tried to reach the destruct button. He got within six inches of it. Then he decided
he had to try to save himself. He got free of the plane. Floating beneath his
parachute, he saw rolling hills, a forest, a lake, a village. In its early spring
greenery, it reminded him of his native West Virginia. He remembered a map in

his pocket showing alternate routes back to Pakistan and Turkey. First taking off
his gloves, he pulled out the map and carefully ripped it into little pieces and
scattered them. Then he thought of the coin and the poison pin inside: a silver
dollar with a hidden pin laced with curare—a device for suicide.

It was the first time Powers had decided to carry the silver dollar. He did so on
a whim, thinking of it vaguely as a potential weapon, not a means of self-
destruction.

Then a sense of the absurdity of the device replaced his previous admiration
for its cleverness. What better token of a capitalist spy pilot than a silver dollar?
It was just the sort of James Bond gadget that people expected the CIA to come
up with—and the agency had tried to meet their expectations. Who in 1960 used
silver dollars anymore, except on ceremonial occasions?

Powers pulled the pin from the coin, hid it in a pocket of his flight suit, then
dropped the silver dollar.

He saw a second parachute blossom above him, which confused him. It
appeared that a Soviet pilot had had to bail out too.

On the ground, someone handed him a filter cigarette—Laika brand, named
after the dog who rode into orbit on Sputnik II. It tasted like the Kents he carried
in his flight suit pocket.

Twice, the pin escaped discovery in body searches. When the Soviets took his
flight suit, though, he warned them about the pin. They tested it on a dog. The
dog’s tongue turned blue, and it collapsed on its side. Within ninety seconds it
stopped breathing; in three minutes it was dead.

He found his interrogators frequently incompetent. There was none of the
torture or Korean War-style brainwashing he had worried about. There was
much danger, he thought, in overestimating your enemy.

He told the Russians plainly that he had trained at the Ranch, Watertown,
strip. His captors came in bearing a map and asked him to point out the Ranch,
“to see if he was telling the truth.” He pointed to a spot but did not mention that
it was a map of Arizona, not Nevada.

The regret in Washington was that the man they had carefully and expensively
trained in Dreamland had had the temerity to survive.

Khrushchev fooled Eisenhower with incomplete statements. He hid the fact
that Powers was alive until Ike came out with the cover story about a weather
flight. The Russians displayed the wreckage of what they said was the U-2, but
Kelly Johnson took one look at it and knew they were lying. It was another game,
although he never understood why the Soviets had done it. The real wreckage
was later displayed in Gorky Park.

It was a classic Cold War mind game. The United States kept insisting that

Powers had had a flameout and had descended to a lower altitude to restart his
engine, while Powers kept insisting he had been shot down at 68,000 feet, which
he gave as the maximum ceiling for the plane. The government wanted to keep
the maximum height from the Soviets; Powers wanted to signal his employers not
to send over any other pilots, that the Soviets had indeed figured out how to
reach the U-2’s operating altitude with SAMs. In citing 68,000 as the maximum
altitude, which was not true, he was also subtly signaling that he had not told the
Russians the real figure.

The Pentagon also wanted to hide the U-2’s true operating ceiling in order to
preserve public trust in the strength of our nuclear deterrent. How long would it
take the press to tell the public that if missiles could reach spy planes above
60,000 feet they could also reach Curtis LeMay’s bombers at their lower
altitudes? It was a game something like the bomber gap game with the Russians:
The president could not reveal that the U-2 had debunked the gap, for which
candidate John F. Kennedy was attacking his administration, without revealing
the existence of the spy plane.

Forced to chose between admitting he didn’t know what was happening in his
own administration and admitting responsibility for the intrusion, Ike chose the
latter, justifying the need for overflights because the Soviets had rejected his
Open Skies proposal, and explicitly citing the danger of “another Pearl Harbor.”

In 1962 Powers was exchanged for Rudolph Abel, whom the CIA had described
as “a master spy” but who later said he got 90 percent of his intelligence from
The New York Times and Scientific American.

The exchange took place on a green bridge between Potsdam and Berlin, a
scene out of a John le Carre novel. In a heavy coat and Russian-style fur hat,
Powers came into view flanked by a pair of goons, then walked past the thin¬
faced Abel without acknowledging him.

On the plane home—one of Kelly Johnson’s Superconstellations—Powers ate a
fine meal of steak and potatoes, as good as anything back at the Ranch.

He was debriefed in a safe house in the Maryland countryside. “What happened
to my airplane?” Kelly Johnson asked him. He believed Powers’s story and, after
the grilling at the congressional hearings, hired Powers as a test pilot flying U-2s.
Apparently, Powers never knew his salary was paid by the CIA.

Powers’s book came out in 1970, for the tenth anniversary of the flight, and
around the same time Lockheed let him go. He then became one of the first
traffic-helicopter pilots in Los Angeles.

The great national and political coming to terms with the shootdown followed.
The planned superpower summit was bust; Eisenhower left office diminished in
prestige. The whole incident became surrounded by a cloud of suspicion. The
mission had been delayed by the Oval Office, and when the go-ahead finally

came, there were problems with the radio and the word had been transmitted by
an open telephone land line—a violation of security. Then there was “the
Granger,” the radar spoofer that the Skunk Works had come up with to fool
Soviet radars. If the Russians knew how the Granger worked, they could have
used it as a tracking device. Three Taiwanese U-2s were later knocked down over
the People’s Republic in a single day in this way.

There was one other dark possibility that Powers wondered about much later.
A young Marine assigned to the radar facilities of the Japanese U-2 had defected
to Russia in 1959. A formal U.S. government investigation discovered that on
three occasions the Marine had spoken to the Soviets of the vital information he
could bring with him if they welcomed him. That government investigation was
the Warren Commission Report, and the young Marine was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Powers died in August 1977, when his traffic helicopter crashed just three
miles from the Skunk Works. He had run out of fuel, but there are those who
believe it was no accident.

Within months after Powers was shot down, Richard Bissell had the temerity to
suggest the program continue flights over the Soviet Union. The president ruled it
out. Never again, the country seemed to collectively resolve, would manned spy
planes make the pilot and the country that vulnerable.

But in August 1960, the very day Frank Powers stood in the dock in Moscow
for sentencing, another of Bissell’s secret projects had finally begun to pay off.
After more than a dozen failures, the engineers running the Corona spy satellite
program successfully recovered a film pod ejected from the satellite whose public
identity was Discoverer XIV.

Snatched by a C-119 Flying Boxcar at 8,500 feet, the capsule contained film of
a million square miles of the Soviet Union—more than all the U-2 flights together
had produced.

This was the future: no human at risk, no violation of airspace. To celebrate,
the engineers got drunk and threw one another into a swimming pool. The
recovery was announced; the public would not learn of the true spy mission for
another thirty years or so.

The most important days of the spy plane, and especially the U-2, were still
ahead. In October 1960, Eisenhower got to see for the first time the airplane that
had caused him so much trouble, when he stopped in Texas after a trip to meet
with the president of Mexico. That same month he approved U-2 flights over
Cuba, where the new government of Fidel Castro was showing increasing
belligerence toward the United States.

In August 1962, U-2 photos of Cuba showed a shape that photointerpreters
recognized from the thousands of images they had of the Soviet Union: the star¬
shaped emplacements of Soviet SAM sites, holding missiles like the one that had

brought down Powers. In the next few weeks, comparing the new pictures with
an extensive database of older ones of the Cuban landscape, they saw more and
more sites under construction, and by October they had matched boxes and
equipment, carefully measured by computer, with shapes and sizes known from
Soviet weapons displayed in Red Square parades: MiG-2 Is and Sandal missiles.
The agency’s top “crateologists,” experts in all sorts of weapons and equipment
packaging, were consulted. It was soon clear that the medium-range missiles—
missiles that normally carried nuclear warheads—were being installed in Cuba.

On Saturday, October 12, 1962, Maj. Richard Heyster took off from Edwards
North Base in a U-2. He reached the coast of Cuba early the next morning and
returned with the key photos showing the six-sided star of SAM sites protecting
the medium-range missiles NATO had code-named Sandal at San Cristobal.

When Heyster’s take provided Art Lundahl, the head of the photo
interpretation office that handled the U-2 photos, with unmistakable evidence of
the presence of Soviet missiles, Lundahl hurried to the White House. By noon on
Tuesday, he was displaying the photos to the president and his top advisers; a
week later, President Kennedy sat in front of the television cameras, announcing
the quarantine (the term was chosen instead of “blockade,” an act of war in
international law).

While the president was speaking, fifty-four of LeMay’s SAC bombers joined
the dozen that were constantly orbiting on alert. Before the crisis was over, SAC
would go from the normal Defense Condition Five to DefCon Two—the highest
ever reached. Three days later, Adlai Stevenson, accompanied by staff from the
National Photo Interpretation Center, was displaying the wares of the U-2 at the
United Nations.

Kennedy ordered more thorough photography of the island, which required
low-level, high-speed RF 101 Voodoos—their snouted shadows show up in the
most famous treetop close-ups of the shrouded missiles and launchers.

On October 27, Maj. Rudolph Anderson was shot down in his U-2—the sole
casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis, save for several crews of military aircraft
that crashed during the mobilization. Anderson’s death came just as the Russians
agreed to remove their missiles; it was the act, the Soviets said years later, of a
trigger-happy local SAM commander.

Even more dangerous was the U-2 that went off course during the crisis and
strayed into Soviet airspace near Siberia. “There’s always some poor son of a
bitch who doesn’t get the message,” Kennedy remarked with a sigh. Khrushchev
had rightly protested that in the current state of tension no one could be sure the
spy plane had not been a bomber, the first shot of a nuclear war.

LeMay, the commander of the Cuban reconnaissance group, and Major Heyster
were called to the Oval Office for commendation. A photo shows Heyster
squeezed on a couch between the bigger officers. “Let me do the talking,” LeMay

said. But days later, what LeMay talked about was how he had lost. He
harangued JFK about how he could have forced out not only the Soviet missiles
but the Soviets and Castro as well. We had the Russian bear in a trap, he said,
and “we should have taken his whole leg off. Hell, we should have taken his
testicles off, too.”

For decades, the U-2 would continue to be a vital source of some of the most
important, detailed political intelligence.

The U-2 victories that did the most to prevent World War III, however, were
the ones over President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Such
intelligence provided support for those resisting the building of more bombers,
more missiles. The numbers that did get built were huge, of course, but without
the solid information to counterbalance the Curtis LeMays, they would have been
far greater and the temptation to use them much stronger.

11. The Blackbirds

The U-2 may have been “Kelly’s Angel,” but even before it had flown over the
Soviet Union, it was clear that what the CIA needed was an “Archangel.” Radars
and missiles were improving. From the very first U-2 flight, CIA operatives and
Skunk Works technicians had been surprised at how quickly the Soviets learned
to track the craft on radar. The U-2 would have to be replaced.

Richard Bissell had the Skunk Works look into the best ways to escape
detection by radar—speed, height, reduced radar profile, or some combination of
the three. The result was the most heroic story in the whole Skunk Works buffs’
catalog.

The Skunk Works plunged into an extensive study of a superplane powered by
hydrogen. Project Suntan, as it was called, cost taxpayers the equivalent of two
billion of today’s dollars before officials realized that creating a whole system of
refrigerated tanks and pipes for liquid hydrogen at bases around the world would
cost billions more. The program would remain secret for nearly twenty years.

In 1960, the CIA finally settled on a Skunk Works plan for a high-flying
conventionally powered craft, flying so high and fast—three times the speed of
sound—that it could elude missiles and fighters. It would be built of titanium, the
first such use of the metal. The program was called Oxcart. Eisenhower,
increasingly apprehensive about the U-2, just called it “the big one.”

Secrecy was even more intense, if that was possible, with Oxcart than with the
U-2. Checks were made out to the dummy C&J corporation. Drawn on the CIA’s
reserve funds, free from overzealous congressional or executive auditing, they
were sent to anonymous post office boxes scattered around Los Angeles. Once, a
suspicious supplier tried to track down the box; he was intercepted by security
agents.

The Ranch, Watertown—or “home plate,” as some were now calling it—
prepared for a much larger effort than the U-2 had required. The new plane,
called the A-12, or Blackbird, would need a longer runway and larger support
staff.

Construction began in earnest in September 1960, and continued on a double¬
shift schedule until mid-1964. The new runway measured 8,500 feet and required
pouring over 25,000 yards of concrete. Kelly Johnson was concerned that with
the high takeoff speed of the Blackbird, expansion joints could set off dangerous
vibrations, so the runway was built of offset slabs, each 150 feet long and layered
in tilelike patterns.

The Blackbird would also need about 500,000 gallons of PF-1 aircraft fuel per
month. After considering an airlift or a pipeline, the team decided to rely on
trucks, but that required paving eighteen miles of highway leading into the base.

SAC again provided support. In late 1961, Air Force colonel Robert J. Holbury
became commander of the base, with a CIA manager as his deputy. Support
aircraft began arriving in the spring of 1962—including eight F-lOls, two T33s, a
C-130 for cargo transport, a U-3A for administration purposes, a helicopter for
search and rescue, a Cessna-180, and a Lockheed F-104 for chase. The Blackbirds
were too big to be loaded onto planes and flown in from Burbank, like the U-2s
had been, so they were carted by truck. A pilot truck outfitted with thirty-five-
foot bamboo outriggers—the size of the finished airplane—drove the route
testing for obstacles, such as signs, branches, and so on. Then the obstacles had to
be removed, sometimes through negotiation with local authorities. Road signs
were hacksawed and hinged for the passage of the new bird.

Between the high-tech complexities of working with titanium and the lower-
tech problems—they tested the ejection seat by towing it with a 1961 Ford
Thunderbird convertible, the fastest car they could rent from Hertz—the Skunk
Works fell behind schedule on the Blackbird’s first flight, and there were
warnings from Richard Bissell.

For the first time, the Skunk Works was falling behind. The initial flight was
originally planned for the end of May 1961, but it slipped to August, largely
because of Lockheed’s difficulties in procuring and fabricating titanium.
Ironically, much of the raw metal would come from the Soviet Union.

Not surprisingly, the manufacturer of the engines, Pratt & Whitney, found it
difficult to turn out a power plant to drive the big airplane to three and a half
times the speed of sound.

It must have galled Johnson to admit the delay when he got a stern note from
Bissell:

I have learned of your expected additional delay in first flight from 30 August
to 1 December 1961. This news is extremely shocking on top of our previous
slippage from May to August and my understanding as of our meeting 19
December that the titanium extrusion problems were essentially overcome. I
trust this is the last of such disappointments short of a severe earthquake in
Burbank.

But delays could come as no surprise, since the Skunk Works was single-
handedly pioneering the use of titanium, learning on the job that the metal had
to be carefully protected against contact with chlorine, fluorine, and cadmium,
which could make tools unusable. The engineers had discovered that the Burbank
water supply was fluoridated, and from then on used only distilled water. A
whole new family of lubricants and seals had to be invented, and even so, the
airplane literally seeped fuel when it sat on the ground with full tanks. For its

whole flying life, the Blackbird had to be “topped off” by in-flight refueling once
it was in the air and expansion had tightened the tanks.

Kelly Johnson predicted that the craft would not be matched for the rest of the
century. It was like a piece of technology retrieved from the future.

In January 1962, an agreement was reached with the Federal Aviation
Administration that extended the restricted airspace around the test area. The
first references to Area 51 began to appear around this time, as well as a new
name applied to the control tower for the airspace: Dreamland.

A number of FAA air traffic controllers were cleared for the project, and the
North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) established procedures to
prevent their radar stations from reporting the appearance of the Blackbirds on
their radar screens. But on the high radar range at Tonopah, operators would
soon be seeing things moving much faster than they could explain.

On February 17, construction of the first aircraft was finished, and in the next
few days the plane underwent its final tests. It was taken apart and stowed on the
special trucks designed to move it to Groom Lake. A famous film clip shows Kelly
Johnson planning the movement of the first A-12 to the base. On the chalkboard
behind him is this list:

Feb 17 Aircraft complete

Feb 18 Aircraft put down on its gear

Feb 19-Feb 22 Engineering final tests

Feb 23-25 Disassemble and load on trucks

Feb 26 4:00 am— Move out to Area 51

On February 26, 1962, at two-thirty in the morning, the convoy bearing the
first plane left Burbank. It arrived by the back road to Groom Lake at about one
in the afternoon on February 28. The second aircraft struck a Greyhound bus en
route; the bus company was quickly and quietly compensated some $4,800 to
settle the damage.

Not until April was the plane ready to fly. On April 26, 1962, pilot Lou Schalk
flew the plane for about a mile and a half, just twenty feet off the ground. The
plane felt like it was wallowing, and he decided to set it back down. From the
ground, the crew saw the plane begin a series of lateral oscillations, which
terrified Johnson, who later recorded that “it was a horrible sight.”

The tower could no longer hear Schalk, and from the tower and the ground
you could see the Blackbird disappear in a great cloud of dust from the lake. It
was enveloped for minutes, then finally reemerged in the distance as Schalk

made a turn. They were relieved he hadn’t run into the mountains.

The first “official” flight took place on April 30, a year behind schedule, and on
the second flight, on May 4, the plane went supersonic. One spectator at the first
flight was Richard Bissell. He had been eased out of the CIA in February 1962, a
dismissal occasioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the previous April and delayed
only for the sake of appearances. At Kelly Johnson’s personal invitation, Bissell
was standing on the white surface at Groom when the long bird he had
championed took off.

Space was the next frontier of espionage, and the first flight of the Blackbird
coincided almost exactly with the orbiting of the first Soviet spy satellite. From
now on, airplanes at Groom would have to be kept in hangars or covered with
camouflage when Soviet satellites passed overhead, as they would be sure to do.
In the Kremlin, they already knew about Dreamland.

The pressure to get the Blackbird operational mounted in the fall. In January
1963, Bob Gilliland arrived at the test location, ready to fly the Air Force fighter
version of the plane, joining pilots Bill Park and Jim Eastham. On May 24 came
the first crash, when the pitot tube iced up and left pilot Ken Collins with no
accurate speed indication. He bailed out over Wendover, Utah. A farmer in a
pickup truck found him. “I’ve just crashed an F-105 with a nuclear weapon on
board,” Collins said. “Let’s get out of here and find a phone.” The farmer quickly
complied.

On August 7, 1962, the AF-12, the fighter version of the Blackbird, first flew. A
whole family of Blackbirds was hatching in the desert, and they could not be kept
hidden much longer.

Shortly after he became president, Lyndon Johnson, briefed about the
Blackbirds, ordered that preparations be made to reveal their existence. It was an
election year and crucial for the president to appear tough on defense. The
leading Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, had already begun to criticize
administration defense policy.

At a press conference on February 24, 1964, Johnson read a statement that
described the new “A-ll” as “an advanced experimental jet aircraft.” (For some
reason, Johnson said A-ll instead of A-12. Similarly, when he announced the
SAC version of the Blackbird, Johnson misstated the assigned name—RS-71, for
“reconnaissance strike,” instead of SR-71. The brass and contractor scrambled to
invent “Strategic Reconnaissance” to back up the reversed initials.)

There was no mention of the first Blackbird, the CIA spy version. And, of
course, there were no “A-11s”—the Lockheed design number for the fighter
version of the Blackbird—at Edwards, so some were quickly flown from
Dreamland to the base. As the “Oxcart Story,” the official CIA history of the
project, reported, “So rushed was this operation, so speedily were the aircraft put

into hangars upon arrival, that heat from them activated the hangar sprinkler
system, dousing the reception team which awaited them.”

In July 1964, pilot Bill Park nearly lost his life when a servo locked up and set
his plane rolling just five hundred feet above the runway. In December of the
next year, Mele Vojvodich ejected safely at an altitude of 150 feet on takeoff: An
electrician had reversed the yaw and pitch gyros—in effect flipped the controls—
and the result was another fireball on the lakebed.

In November 1964, the airplane was pronounced ready for use. As early as
October 1962, the agency had been eager to offer the still-adolescent Blackbird
for spying on Cuba, where the U-2s were vulnerable to SAMs. And in the fall of
1964, Khrushchev threatened to shoot down U-2s over Cuba after the presidential
election. At Dreamland, hasty preparations were made to ready A-12s for the job
if the Soviet premier carried out his threat.

The Blackbirds were not black at first, but metallic, except in front of the canopy
and on the edges, where they were painted dark, like the greasepaint on a
football player’s cheekbones to cut the glare. Now Ben Rich had the idea to paint
them black, to deal with the heat of high-speed flight.

To showcase the new plane’s abilities, on December 21, 1966, pilot Bill Park
flew 10,198 statute miles in six hours. Taking off from Dreamland, he started
north toward Yellowstone National Park, then eastward to Bismarck, North
Dakota, and on to Duluth, Minnesota. Turning south, Park passed Atlanta en
route to Tampa, Florida, then back northwest to Portland, Oregon, and southeast
to Nevada. The flight continued eastward, passing Denver and St. Louis. Turning
around at Knoxville, Tennessee, Park slipped by Bob Gilliland’s hometown of
Memphis in the home stretch back to Nevada. This flight established a record
unapproachable by any other aircraft.

The guys on the start carts—the big twin Buick and Chevy V-8s they would roll
up to “crank” the engines on the Blackbirds—really liked Bill Park. So it was
especially tough for them to watch, from the south end of the Groom runway, as
the long black plane, just five hundred feet above the lake, went careening to one
side and began rolling steadily like a boat going over, until they could see only
the bottom of the airplane, with its landing-gear doors and streaks and smears,
finally plunging down. The lake filled with an ugly orange balloon of flame,
blackening at its edges. They were talking on the phone to the guys back at the
hangar trying to figure out what the hell had happened when Park walked up,
the picture of calm.

Park hadn’t had much time to think. He couldn’t get the plane to respond. It
wouldn’t stop rolling. It was down to two hundred feet when he flicked the arm
switch for the seat, then leaned forward and grabbed the big D-ring between his
legs—like some big, loopy luggage handle—and leaned back, putting his weight

into it. And suddenly the top was gone, the air rushing cleanly through the
cockpit, and in another fraction of a second, still in the seat, he was sailing up
into the rangy mountains around Dreamland.

Kicking Park up the pole was the rocket engine under his rear end. As soon as
it quit, he got another kick as the drogue chute opened, and then the seat ejector,
the straps they called “butt snappers,” threw him out, the way it was supposed to,
but he could see he was pretty close to the ground, and it must have felt like
forever before the chute finally opened. Two things seemed to happen at the very
same moment. First, he was grabbed by the chest and legs as the chute went taut,
drawing him upright. And second, his feet hit the ground. Then he gathered up
his chute and began walking toward the end of the runway. It was not the last
time Park would eject at the Ranch.

For the test pilots, Dreamland was just the office, their everyday job. They saw
very little that was exciting and certainly nothing mysterious about Groom Lake.
Secrecy was a burden, a frustration. But the difference between a test pilot and a
regular pilot, said Bob Gilliland, is that test pilots have emergencies every day.
What caused the most fear? one Blackbird pilot was asked. Fear? He wouldn’t
touch the word. “Sure,” he said. “From time to time there were levels of concern'' 1

The basic mode of life on the Ranch was akin to the mind-numbing tedium
characteristic of military installations the world over. One ground-support man
tried to liven things up—and, it must be speculated, supplement his salary—by
showing pornographic movies. Blue movies for the blue sky boys! But Kelly
Johnson got wind of it and put his foot down, albeit softly. “Whatever you’ve got
up there, I just want it out,” he told the man.

Bob Gilliland came into the program through his friend pilot Lou Schalk. It came
about because of a problem with Bob’s Mercedes. Bob had to drop it off at an
auto shop on Sunset Boulevard and he got Schalk to pick him up. Schalk had a
red Austin Healey, and on the way back the two pilots, jammed together in the
little British sports car, began talking. Schalk told Gilliland that he was flying a
new airplane Kelly Johnson was developing and that he needed another test
pilot.

Gilliland was having fun flying the F-104, a real hot rod of a fighter, and he
was afraid the new plane was some weird settle-on-its-butt thing like the vertical-
takeoff-and-landing craft the Skunk Works had dreamed up and Herm Salmon
had flown. But he agreed to talk to Kelly Johnson. Johnson told him that the new
plane “will be faster and go higher and farther than the 104.” That got Gilliland
interested.

“Now, let’s go take a look,” Johnson said. He led Gilliland into the hangar
where the next Blackbird still lay in long, sharp pieces. Gilliland could sense an
excitement in the very shapes, as Johnson knew a good pilot would. He signed

on.

Johnson hated the military test pilots. He always wanted his own pilots to test
the new planes thoroughly before the military boys could get their hands on
them. It all went back to 1939, when Ben Kelsey, an Army test pilot, lost the
prototype of the P-38 trying to fly it across the country to set a new record. It
would impress the brass and Congress and the public. But he came in too low on
landing, an engine gulped and hesitated, and he ended up in a bank on a golf
course.

It set the program back two years. Tony LeVier went so far as to say that that
particular piece of grandstanding prolonged the war. So Johnson picked his test
pilots carefully, and their succession is as legendary in the aviation world as that
of Yankee centerfielders: Milo Burcham on the P-38, Tony LeVier on the XP-80
jet and F-104 Starfighter, Lou Schalk, Jim Eastham, Bob Gilliland, Bill Park.

Security was intense. Lockheed even airbrushed the mountains out of the
background of photographs to help disguise the location. The situation was much
changed from the early days of the U-2, the surplus Navy structures
supplemented with brand-new modern hangars, and a workforce that had grown
by five or six times, to 1,100 or so by 1962.

Life at Groom was dull, but Bob Gilliland would go jogging and lift weights
sometimes to shed stress. You could play tennis and there was a softball team,
but not much else. Lou Schalk found other diversions: He brought the red Austin
Healey to the base and raced it across the lake bed against Jim Eastham’s blue
one.

But it was exciting learning how to carefully move the inlet spikes, like big
missile nose cones, that were the key to engine performance, to make the
airplane go higher and faster. It was exciting, Gilliland always felt, because
almost every evening meant the end of another day when he had been able to fly
faster than any pilot in history. Only no one knew. By the fall of 1963 they were
flying the airplane well beyond Mach 3, at 110,000 feet.

There was no television, only radio, at the Ranch, and one day in November
1963 Gilliland came back from flying “the CIA bird,” the A-12, to find that
everyone in the hangar was gathered around the radio. “What’s going on?” he
asked. “JFK has been shot, LBJ has been shot, Connally has been shot,” someone
told him. Bill Park said, “Well, hell, I don’t know what all the excitement’s about.
It’s just another Texas shoot-out.” The pilots by then were as dry and hard as the
bed of Groom Lake. They seemed to have absorbed the desert itself.

Park was the driest. Ben Rich called him “an outstanding stick man, cool and
calm,” but there was more. When there was discussion of basing U-2s on aircraft
carriers, it was Park who was called on to see if it could work. He landed one on

the pitching deck. Using a special technique he devised himself, in 1958 Park had
pushed the F-104 to a world record altitude of 91,985 feet—a record the Skunk
Works had to keep secret.

When Kelly Johnson strapped the D-21 drone onto the back of the Blackbird, in
the program called Tagboard, he picked Park to fly the dangerous release
missions. The idea was to send an unmanned craft over China to take a look at
the far western Lop Nor nuclear test area.

After takeoff from Groom Lake, the launch run would begin over Dalhart,
Texas, aiming for a release point around Point Mugu in California. The Blackbird
took half a continent’s width just to get warmed up to Mach 3 plus, the speed
necessary for the D-21’s ramjet to function.

The very first time they got the mother plane up to speed, the D-21 let go all
right, but it stuck close to the big airplane as if reluctant to venture off on its
own. Then all of a sudden it veered and dropped—the engine gulped and faltered
—and hit the tail of the Blackbird, pitching the big plane forward. The long black
plane snapped in the middle and, still traveling at Mach 3, began to tumble
down, as both Park and Ray Torick, the backseat man in charge of the launch,
flipped the levers to arm the ejection seats and pulled the rings. In the Pacific off
Point Mugu, Park was picked up by rescue helicopters, but Torick’s pressure suit
filled with water and dragged him to his death.

Kelly Johnson immediately canceled the D-21 test program; it would remain
secret for more than a decade. The strange black D-21s would make their way to
Arizona, where years later, in the boneyard, I would see them—or I wouldn’t.

Park would become the longest-serving pilot at Dreamland. He went on to fly
Have Blue, the first Stealth prototype. When he first saw it, Park couldn’t imagine
how the thing would ever fly. A lot had been sacrificed to get the right radar
cross sections. Thinner and more dartlike than the Stealth fighter to come, it was
painted up in a desert camou, a broken pattern of grays and browns. It also had
what was known as an “an excessive sink rate,” a tendency to fall like a stone in
certain low speeds. Its wings were too small. This could be fixed in a production
fighter, but it was something the test pilots had to live with.

Coming in one day in 1976, the plane took a dip on Park and hit hard on the
right gear. He pulled up and around, but when he started to lower the gear again,
the right would not go down. He even came down on the left and tried to shake
the other gear lose, without success. Park took the airplane up to ten thousand
feet and burned off most of his remaining fuel. “Unless anyone has a better idea,”
he radioed, “I’m bailing out.” That morning, the commander had asked him
about letting the base paramedic go for the day. There hadn’t been any problems
on earlier flights, and the test series was nearing its end. But Park demurred. He
went by the book.

Now he had to pull the ring again, but he struck his head on the headrest,
cracked a vertebra, and was knocked out. Amazingly, the seat lifted him free of
the airplane at ten thousand feet, he separated from the seat, and the chute
opened as designed. But still unconscious, he hit hard. He broke a leg and his
head was dragged along the caliche, where his mouth filled with dry sand. By the
time the paramedics got to him, his heart had stopped. He would spend six weeks
in intensive care and six months in a cast.

The quintessential Park story is not of any of his bailouts, but of an earlier
close call. He was flying a U-2 out of Burbank when it developed fuel problems.
The engine quit and he had to dead-stick it home. He barely made it back to
base, clearing a chain-link fence by six inches. Ben Rich came out to the airplane.
“What happened?” Rich asked. “I don’t know,” Park said. “I just got here myself.”

The secret black planes would challenge SAC, and LeMay. Dreamland was,
indirectly, an offspring, too, of the blue-sky, high-noon vision that was SAC.
While Dreamland would birth black planes, they would serve SAC’s silver
bombers. They would find the targets for the bombers to strike. And they would,
the day after doomsday, fly back to see how well the silver planes had done.

One day in 1962, Richard Bissell came to the White House to brief JFK on the
new and still very secret Blackbird, the CIA’s A-12. The president was puzzled.
He looked at the documents, and listened to Bissell telling him how far and fast
the agency’s new plane could fly. “Could Kelly Johnson convert your airplane
into a bomber?” the president asked. “That question is more properly addressed
to General LeMay,” Bissell diplomatically answered.

But it got Johnson in hot water, and he was not pleased with Bissell. Johnson
had carefully not spoken to the Air Force or the Pentagon about the bomber
version of the Blackbird. He knew LeMay wouldn’t like a black challenge to his
silver planes. But now he hurried to Washington to work his charm on the
bypassed generals. Later in 1962, when the B-70 was cut back from ten planned
planes to four, LeMay blamed Johnson.

Finally, the two men met at the Skunk Works. Their aides drew back as they
walked and conferred, the cigar smoke trailing behind them. By the end of the
day, it appeared Johnson’s charm had had an effect. LeMay seemed all set to
order bombers and recon Blackbirds—an entire black air force. But by the end of
the year, only the SR-71—the reconnaissance version—had been ordered.

With the SR-71, SAC got its own Blackbirds, and while it used them to spy on
distant countries—the Soviet Union and China excepted—their ostensible job was
something called “post-strike reconnaissance.” The SR-71 s came in handy in
1973, when the United States eased tensions in the Mideast by offering the
Soviets photographic proof of Israeli positions. The Soviets had threatened
intervention; now they backed off.

Primarily, though, the SR-71s were supposed to be part of SAC’s main
“deterrent” mission—fighting nuclear wars. The SR-71s’ job would be to fly over
the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war, after the bombs and missiles had
fallen, and “assess battle damage.” What they did do was simple intelligence
gathering, flying over trouble spots, and, after the A-12s were phased out in
1968, they did it for the CIA as well as the Air Force.

But to keep up the original premise, SR pilots had to go through the monthly
ritual of refresher courses in post-nuclear-battle damage assessment, learning to
distinguish what cities were in need of additional blows and on which targets
another nuke would simply, in the infamous phrase of the overkill era, “bounce
the rubble.” The exercise struck the pilots as not only pointless but grim and
surreal.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was looking at different kinds of planes.
McNamara—“Mack the Knife,” the contractors called him—was pushing the THX
for both the Air Force and the Navy.

Both the Air Force and the Navy hated it—if only because it forced them to
share. McNamara not only killed the Blackbird but put in motion the process that
would destroy the tooling to produce it. The Skunk Works buffs all know the dark
day: On May 5, 1970, Kelly Johnson was ordered to sell the dies and jigs for the
fastest, highest-flying airplane in history as scrap for just a few cents a pound.

But the symbolic end had come on June 26, 1968, when a group of high-level
CIA officials, pilots, and pilots’ families assembled on the caliche at Groom Lake.
Each of the living agency pilots, and the families of those who had died, were
presented the agency’s highest award, the Intelligence Star. At last wives got a
glimpse of the strange place to which their husbands had been disappearing. But
there would be no public acknowledgment of the existence of the CIA Blackbird
for another two decades.

12. Low Observables

The Blackbird had succeeded because of the great speed and altitude at which it
flew. But before the plane ever took off, the Skunk Works people knew it could
never safely fly over the Soviet Union. Constantly improving Soviet radars, such
as the one the Pentagon called Tall King, could spot it even if the human eye
could not.

The Blackbird looked as if it had been shaped for speed, but the knifelike
extensions of its fuselage, called chines, which made it look like a sword with
wings, had been designed to elude radar. Future airplanes would take their
shapes less from the wind tunnel than from radar test chambers and be sculpted
not by shock waves but by electromagnetic ones.

In the 1860s and 70s, in quiet labs at King’s College London and Cambridge, the
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell theorized that light, electricity,
magnetism, and what would later be called radio- and microwaves were all
related. In his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, he told how they shared
the properties of reflection and refraction, diffraction and polarization. Here lay
the origins of radar.

One day in 1932, with fascism taking hold across Europe, former prime
minister Stanley Baldwin stood up in the House of Commons to deliver a warning
that there was no longer any question of protecting the man in the street from
bombing. During World War I, zeppelins had bombed London, and the British
understood that no fleet could provide full defense in the future. The next war
would turn on the fact that Britain “was no longer an island.” “The bomber will
always get through” was Baldwin’s famous phrase, to be repeated down the
decades in the debate over airpower.

“The only defense is in offense,” he went on, “which means that you will have
to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy.” It was an
endorsement of the teachings of the airpower enthusiasts and a foretaste of the
doctrines of massive retaliation and assured deterrence.

Not everyone could accept that there was no defense against the bomber,
however. Just as Ronald Reagan, a half century later, would look to the dream of
Star Wars to break the logjam of mutual destruction, the British air ministry
desperately sought new ways to shoot down bombers. They even looked at such
exotic ideas as radio-wave weapons—ray guns. How much radio energy would it
take to make a man’s blood boil? scientists were asked. How much to blow an
airplane out of the sky?

The results were not promising, but something else interesting came out of the
discussion: the idea that you could locate, if not destroy, an airplane by beaming
radio waves at it and capturing and measuring the reflection. Clerk Maxwell had
postulated in 1873, and the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had later shown,
that microwaves would behave like light waves. The early radar scientists worked
out just how this was so. They had invented a new way of seeing things in the
sky. Instead of ray guns, they got radar.

It took an odd character, met with some disdain in the London gentlemen’s
clubs where the planning went on, to turn the idea into reality.

Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a pudgy and loquacious man in the Ministry of
Defense, pushed the idea of radio detection and ranging. (The British provided
the idea but the Americans would provide the acronym.) He tracked a Dutch
airliner crossing the Channel in 1937, and by the time of the Battle of Britain he
had laid out a network of stations that fed into the underground war room. By
the narrowest of margins, and aided by Hitler’s and Goering’s failure to strike
first at airbases rather than at civilians, radar seemed to have won the air war for
the British in 1940. “Britain,” Watson-Watt declared, triumphantly but
prematurely, “is an island once more.”

Such security was not long lasting. And America, too, would soon enough no
longer be a continent protected from attack by even greater extents of water.
With the coming of the atomic bomb, the consequences of bombers crossing the
ocean became even more frightening.

Electronics, however, was advancing more rapidly than jet engines or
airframes. By the 1960s, the big bomber was an endangered species. By the
1970s, radar had such a lead over even aircraft equipped with their own jamming
and spoofing electronics that it seemed unlikely that “the bomber will always get
through.” This became specifically clear to the U.S. Air Force in the 1973 Mideast
war, when some thirty of the topline fighters it had sold to Israel were shot down
by improved radar and SAMs. The Pentagon had been right to kill LeMay’s B-70
—new SAMs would have made it obsolete—but smaller, faster planes were
vulnerable as well.

In 1975 the Pentagon began convening special conclaves of scientists, engineers,
and contractors to consider a response. The Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) was put in charge. Founded in the wake of Sputnik, DARPA
served as the Pentagon’s version of Bell Labs, a free-thinking outfit dedicated to
exploring the frontiers of technology liberated from bureaucracy and interservice
rivalries.

It planned the first ICBMs and designed sensors for Robert McNamara’s line,
the high-tech barrier planned for Vietnam’s Demilitarized Zone. It developed the
autonomous land vehicle, a huge walking tank, like something out of the

Imperial army in The Empire Strikes Back. DARPA created improved integrated
circuits, sensors, and actuators, the sinews and joints of modern weaponry. But
most important, DARPA’s funds had built up the computer industry in the 1960s
and would give us the computer mouse and the Internet—initially called
ARPANET.

To come up with a means of eluding the new, powerful radars, DARPA created
a project called Harvey, after Jimmy Stewart’s invisible bunny pal, to look into
making an airplane invisible to radar, or at least harder to see. It signed up four
leading airplane builders and gave them four million dollars apiece to solve the
problem. Lockheed was at first not among the four. The irony was that the Skunk
Works achievements in reducing radar cross section on the Blackbirds, including
the stealthy D-21 drone, had been so secret that no one in the Pentagon knew of
them; thus when the discussion turned to stealth, no one thought of Lockheed. To
get the company included in DARPA’s stealth studies, along with Boeing,
McDonnell Douglas, and Northrop, Rich had to do some fast talking to DARPA’s
George Heilmeier.

The Skunk Works was not in good odor. Kelly Johnson was seen as arrogant
and difficult, living in the days of its past glories. To inform the DARPA scientists
of the work the Skunk Works had done nearly a decade before, Rich had to
persuade the CIA to release information on the stealthy technology of the A-12
and the D-21. With that information in hand he persuaded DARPA to let
Lockheed participate.

One day in April 1975, just as he had settled down to a cup of instant
decaffeinated coffee, Ben Rich had a visitor. He had taken over as boss of the
Skunk Works in January and was looking for projects. Now a young man named
Denys Overholser sat down and began to tell Rich about a footnote in a nine-
year-old Russian technical paper that had only recently been translated by the Air
Force Foreign Technology Division. Bearing the engaging title “Method of Edge
Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” the article was the work of Pyotr
Ufimtsev, chief scientist of the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. It was
about radar-evading, “low observable” shapes, what would soon be known as
“stealth.”!

Overholser explained to Rich that Ufimtsev had updated the equations of Hertz
and Hermann Helmholtz so that one could for the first time calculate the radar
reflection of a two-dimensional shape, such as the surface of an airplane. With
that knowledge, you could design an airplane so that it would reflect radar waves
away, off into space, instead of back to the receiver. And you could do this
regardless of the size of the shape—in other words, a huge shape could be made
to look small, almost invisible, on radar.

Overholser, a chunky mountain biker who had shaped radomes for the Skunk
Works, was now assigned by Rich to turn the equations into a computer program

and the program into the shape of a new airplane.

In five weeks, he and Bill Schroeder, the longtime Skunk Works radar and math
whiz who had come out of retirement, wrote a program called Echo to do the
calculations of an optimum shape for scattering radar beams. They took the
numbers to a junior designer, Dick Sherrer, and by May 5 were back in Rich’s
office with the results: drawings of an arrowhead-shaped airplane they called
Hopeless Diamond.

“So would this one,” Rich asked, suggesting for comparison radar signatures
given in terms of aircraft or bird types, “be the size of a Cessna or what, a
condor, an eagle?”

“Ben,” Overholser said. “An eagle’s eyeball.”

Thereafter, Rich got hold of a number of ball bearings the approximate size of
an eagle’s eyeball, and took them on his trips to the Pentagon, rolling them
across generals’ desks and saying, “There’s your airplane!”

A few months later, someone on Rich’s staff gave him a bowling ball painted
top secret: It was the radar signature of the whole Pentagon after it had been
subjected to the Skunk Works stealth treatment.

When Johnson saw the sketch of the Hopeless Diamond, he literally kicked Ben
Rich in the ass. “It’ll never get off the ground,” he predicted. Johnson had always
said that if an aircraft looked beautiful, it would fly well. It was the classic
premise of the great clipper-ship designers and race-car engineers. But this plane
was ugly. Rich would write, “No one would dare to claim that the Hopeless
Diamond would be a beautiful airplane. As a flying machine it looked alien.”

Johnson also loathed electronics, and this was an airplane designed for its
electronics, by electricians. “If Kelly could find a hydraulic radio, he would use
that,” went an old chestnut around the Skunk Works. He was famous for winning
his quarter bets on this or that issue of technology; his penny-pinching ways were
legendary at the Skunk Works, tokens of his hardscrabble upbringing. Now Rich
bet him that the Hopeless Diamond would have a lower radar cross section than
the fifteen-year-old D-21. (The calculations suggested it would be a thousand
times less visible on radar.) On September 14, 1975, they took the two wooden
models of the two aircraft into an electromagnetic chamber. The results were
clear, and Johnson handed over the quarter, mumbling, “Don’t spend it until you
see the thing fly.”

In October, they took the model to Gray Butte, the radar cross-section test site
that belonged to McDonnell Douglas. On one occasion when the model was on
the test pole, there was a sudden blossom of reflection. Uh-oh, the guys in the
test center thought, was there some angle they had not considered? Then
someone looked out at the model; on its pole in the middle of the concrete, they
noticed that a large blackbird had landed on it. Even the droppings from birds

could add to the radar reflection—a decibel and a half, as these things were
measured, to a total reflection of three decibels.

Then in March 1976 they trucked the black-painted wooden model all the way
to the Ratscat—the “radar scatter” facility at White Sands, New Mexico—for a
“fly-off” with Northrop’s stealth model. The results were so overwhelmingly in
favor of the Lockheed model that Northrop radar expert John Cashen was
dismayed. The Hopeless Diamond was revolutionary—if it could actually fly. Nor
was it clear that Kelly Johnson would be wrong about that. Making this shape fly
depended on computers, as the airplane would be too unstable for a mere human
pilot alone.

Although Johnson was appalled by it, the Stealth’s shape provided the very
embodiment of the Skunk Works doctrine of simplicity. “It looked totally alien,”
Ben Rich had said, because it was radically simple. It was a sculpture on the
theme of the cutting away of excess, an airplane that flew no better than it had to
so that it could not be seen.

Born inside a computer, it resembled what programmers call a wireframe
drawing, making the most of limited processing power. In fact, it resembled the
angular tanks and obstacles and flying saucers in the early video game called
Battlezone. These shapes would eventually show up in a new kind of aerial
combat that itself resembled a computer game.

With the machinists union on strike, Skunk Works managers did much of the
work on the prototype. The engines were ground-tested at night in a rigged-up
barrier composed of two tractor trailers. Then, on December 1, 1977, Bill Park,
having demanded and received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus to fly the
ugliest airplane he had ever seen—especially after seeing the cockpit, which
offered very little space from which to escape—lifted off the runway at Groom in
what was now called the XST—experimental stealth testbed—or Have Blue.

Now the Skunk Works had to prove that the real airplane was as stealthy as the
wooden model on the pole. Park and other pilots began testing it against real
radars, the bad-guy radars, surreptitiously obtained, like the Red Hat squadron’s
MiGs, and as carefully hidden in the remote corners of the Tonopah Test Range
adjoining Dreamland.

During one test, Have Blue showed up as a bright blip on the screen. The
engineers couldn’t understand what was wrong. Then someone noticed that three
screws had not been driven flat. The heads sticking up just a fraction of an inch
triggered a huge radar return.

It was soon clear to William Perry, who had become Stealth’s champion at the
Pentagon, that his scientists were looking at something as groundbreaking for
warfare as the jet engine had been, or the machine gun, perhaps even as
revolutionary as gunpowder or the crossbow. Keeping this shape hidden was

vital. More than any airplane before, perhaps, the form signaled function. You
got the idea just by seeing it.

In the late seventies, most of the world thought stealth meant paints or panels
that absorbed radar, not the faceting of this airplane. Keeping Have Blue invisible
became a top priority.

By day, the strange shape, only three fifths the size of the “real plane,” with a
cramped cockpit and crude systems, could attract attention. At first the model
was disguised in a mottled camou, browns and grays and light blue, but this did
not seem to work very well, so it was repainted a light gray. It was never brought
outside unless uncleared personnel had been exiled to the windowless mess hall
or to quarters, and when Soviet satellites were scheduled to pass overhead it was
left in the hangar or under the shelters, called “scoot and hide,” beside the
taxiway.

In June 1977 a small unmarked passenger plane landed on the runway at Groom
Lake and from it emerged President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski. He met Rich and walked around Have Blue sitting in its
hangar, and was briefed in a secure room. By the end of the month, Carter had
canceled the B-l bomber and put his faith in the “Advanced Technology
Bomber,” the B-2 flying wing.

By the autumn of 1978 Have Blue had proved itself well enough that the
Pentagon gave Lockheed a contract to build a fighter version. It was to be ready
to fly by July 1980. That fighter, despite Kelly Johnson’s revulsion, would come
to possess a kind of beauty that seemed at first far from conventional standards.
It was a model of Dreamland itself: hard, angular, unabsorbing, unforgiving.

In reality, of course, the shape of the Stealth fighter reflected the state of the
computer art at the time it was designed (applying Ufimtsev’s equations even on
a big computer could yield only facet shapes). The calculation of radar
reflectance from curves was a more complicated task and showed up in the B-2
bomber and the TR3A Black Manta, or “baby B-2.”

By 1980 the word stealth had begun to creep into media reports. CBS News
television correspondent David Martin filed one pointed piece. It was unclear
whether leaks in an election year were a matter of politics, but in August 1980,
with candidate Ronald Reagan hitting Jimmy Carter hard on defense issues,
Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, with Bill Perry standing beside him, talked
about stealth as a breakthrough. Most people then thought in terms of bombers,
since the revelation helped cover President Carter’s flank, exposed by the
cancellation of the B-l. But there was a backlash, too, to the revelations, which
the Republicans exploited: Carter should not have revealed such deep secrets.

The formal first flight came in April 1982, but it was another six years before
the taxpayer would get a good look at the airplane. With generals and dignitaries

lined up along the runway, the airplane began to taxi forward, with Bob
Riedenauer at the controls. It slowly lifted off, but only a few feet above the
runway it began to veer to one side. The shocked crowd watched as it flipped
onto its back and fell onto the lake bed in a huge dust cloud. The rescue trucks
rushed up and cut Riedenauer out as he hung upside down. He never flew again.

Mechanics had miswired a new control unit, switching the controls for yaw
with those for pitch, so that when Riedenauer had attempted to pull up on the
stick he actually sent the plane heeling to the right. Skunkers noted that this was
a near duplicate of an accident in which Mele Vojvodich had almost died, in a
Blackbird, on the same runway. But the crash was also a reminder that this
unnatural shape depended as much on software as on hardware to fly. Its
workings were no longer visible, in the manner of mechanical things, but hidden
in computer code.

The shape of the craft itself, however, was an immediate signal as to its secret.
And that shape would be hidden away in a new secret base north of Dreamland
near the town of Tonopah.

I drove up to Tonopah one fall day, heading around the nuclear test site and the
Nellis range. Las Vegas brags that it is “the city that never sleeps,” but I passed
acres of new condos west of town, bedroom communities. Can a city that never
sleeps dream? Or is its whole waking life a dream, the way the gambler’s is—the
dream of the long shot?

At the entrance to the Paiute Indian reservation a billboard read cheap cigarettes.
Farther up the road was Indian Springs, the old World War II air base where B-
29s took off to drop bombs at the test site, where the Thunderbirds practice—and
where Lazar said he was “debriefed.”

It looked much as it did twenty or even fifty years before—much as Groom
Lake must have looked in the days of the U-2, I thought. But there was a recent
addition—strange new inflatable buildings beside the flight line—and everything
was surprisingly spruced up, as if the base had been restored for a film. (In one
version of the Roswell story, Indian Springs had been the site of the first secret
saucer storage facility, and perhaps for the storage of alien bodies as well.)

After Indian Springs the four-lane ran out. The sign mercury—no services introduced
the town that had grown from the base camp of the test site. Another sign
announced that the fronting stretch of highway had been adopted by nevadans for
peace. At first exhilarating, the distance soon became nauseating. I wondered if
there could be such a thing as distance sickness, like altitude sickness, the lack of
detail and purchase for the eye corresponding to a lack of oxygen.

gateway to death valley, a sign greeted cheerfully at Beatty, est. 1903 . rio rancho rv park,
burro inn: full hookups. Another pointed to Parumph, twenty-seven miles away, heart
of the old new west. And home, I knew, of the Art Bell Dreamland radio show, where

conspiracy theorists talked to sleepless callers late at night.

Farther up the road, some of the towns seemed barely worth the trouble of
designating them. It was as if the mapmakers had been desperate to work in a
couple of dots in the white space so they would not be suspected of slacking off.
The signs for the towns told of elevation rather than population, the former being
a far more impressive figure.

The mountains now seemed to grow more angular, with pyramidal tops and
neatly sliced sides. I had the odd thought that the landscape had crept in as a
stylistic influence on the shape of the Stealth fighter, as critic John Ruskin, citing
chalets in the Alps, had credited local landscape with influencing architecture.

By the time I got to Tonopah I was in a virtual blizzard. A huge American flag
driven by the wind was noisily beating its heart out against a pole in front of the
Forest Service office south of town, elevation 6030 . home of the stealth.

I stopped at the Forest Service office to get out of the weather and idly looked
for maps. A heavy woman behind the counter chatted away. “My husband works
out there at the site. Sometimes I go to pick him up, and he warned me that if I
ever broke down to just stay in the car. ‘Don’t get out,’ he told me. They don’t
like people poking around.”

At the local historical museum, the exhibits consisted mostly of odd pieces of
equipment from the mines, chunks of silver ore, and pieces of crashed airplanes.
An aerial photo showed a Stealth fighter flying above the old mining towers and
piles of tailings. “Tonopah” means “land of little wood and water” in Paiute, but
its mellifluous syllables had become magic to the stealth-chasers.

Tonopah was built on booms, interrupted by busts: the silver boom, then the
big booms at the nuclear test site, and finally the sonic booms of secret planes. In
1900, silver was found in the Silver Bow mine, and saloons and casinos and
whorehouses were thrown up overnight. In 1922 came the Big Casino, which
touted itself as “the Monte Carlo of the desert.”

In October 1940 the government turned over some five thousand square miles
of public land to the military for training. Government silver certificates replaced
the paycheck of the silver miners. A base was in operation at Tonopah by July
1942, and would-be fighter pilots came to the area to learn to fly BT-13 trainers
and the P-39 fighter, so dangerous in its handling that both the American Army
Air Corps and the RAF had rejected it.

Chuck Yeager was one of the first to train there. He lived in a tar-paper shack
heated by an oil stove and recalled that the wind never seemed to stop blowing.
“On paydays,” he would write, “we crowded around the blackjack tables of the
Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then
staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a
fresh supply of gals so we wouldn’t get bored and become customers of Lucky

Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road. But we went to
Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next
morning, a P-39 strafed Mina’s water tower.”

In the fifties, the opening of the test site to the south brought jobs for the
miners and other hands. The skills of the miner, by happy coincidence, were in
demand at the test site after the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1962.
Testing went underground, and long tunnels had to be built to hold test
equipment to record radiation and heat and blast.

Tonopah enjoyed a brief flurry of notoriety in 1957, when Howard Hughes
married his longtime companion Jean Peters at the Mizpah Hotel. Hughes picked
the Mizpah because he had business in the area to transact. His father had
prospected here, and Hughes was betting that the silver veins were not quite
tapped out. In a few months, he bought up some 710 claims, covering most of
Tonopah along with some 14,200 acres of Nye and areas in other counties, for
$10.5 million.

At just about the same time, the nuclear weapons designers at Sandia Labs in
Albuquerque cast greedy eyes on the empty areas of the Nellis range south of the
old Tonopah base and north of the test site. By 1958, they had set up the
Tonopah Test and Training Range, dropping bombs to test fuses and cases and
parachutes. The Interceptors would become intrigued by other sectors inside
Tonopah’s ranges, such as the Tolicha Peak Electronic Warfare facility, Base
Camp, to the north of Highway 6 near Warm Springs, and Site IV, where foreign
radars are tested, the name an odd shadow of Bob Lazar’s mystery site, S-4, at
Papoose Lake.

What drew them most, however, was the huge base built almost overnight in
the middle of a test range previously dedicated mostly to radar and electronics.

One day in 1984, Col. Robert “Burner Bob” Jackson was reading The Wall Street
Journal when a small advertisement caught his eye. The Chevron petroleum
company had secondhand oil patch trailers to sell. Jackson bought the trailers for
$10 million; he was about to move the Stealth fighter group from Groom Lake to
Tonopah.

The trailers ended up on the raw site south of the old Tonopah Air Field, where
mustangs roamed the runways and scorpions crept into buildings. Fences and
searchlights went up along the edge of the new base, and video cameras and
motion sensors were installed. Eventually the Air Force spent $300 million and
fitted the place out with a gym and indoor pool.

The activity did not go unnoticed. A-7s were kept parked outside, as Soviet
satellite passes overhead increased to three and four a day. The A-7s were part of
a cover story; they carried old napalm canisters painted black and decorated with
flashing red lights and lettering that read reactor cooling fill port. The idea was to

spread the information that these were an “atomic anti-radar system.” Ground
crews were forced to lie spread-eagle and not look at the craft as they passed.
The lie must be made as hard to get at as the truth.

In the fall of 1988, the Air Force released the first, heavily doctored
photograph of the fighter. It was so vague and the angle so misleading that some
pilots doubled over in laughter when they saw it.

But soon the airplane buffs found out about Tonopah and the fence. By the
winter of 1988, some were getting glimpses, even snapshots, that showed the
strange flat shape from the bottom, the angular diamond, faceted and crimped.

Byron Augenbaugh, a schoolteacher and airplane buff from Escondido,
California, drove up to Tonopah one day in the spring of 1989. At a gas station
he asked where he should go to see the Stealth fighter. “Just look up,” the
attendant told him, and sure enough one flew over. Augenbaugh snapped a
picture. On May 1, 1989, Aviation Week ran a cover shot of the fighter so fuzzy
that one of the magazine’s editors said “it looked like a French Impressionist
painting.”

There was something lascivious about such images. In the first pictures of the
Stealth fighter the Air Force would release, the inlets for the engines were
airbrushed out, like the flaws in a Playboy centerfold model. Around the same
time the Air Force chief of staff went so far as to testify that an airplane, like a
beautiful woman, should reveal itself not completely but bit by bit. But artists’
impressions of the Stealth fighter and other suspected aircraft that appeared in
magazines such as Popular Science had their highlights exaggerated, like the
women in bomber-nose art, their shapes made fuller and more magical, and with
magical light swelling and suffusing the shapes and saturating the colors. 2

These paintings stood in contrast to the spy photos and flying saucer snapshots,
blurry and grainy like the telephoto images of sunbathing celebrities in European
magazines—located somewhere between imagination and reality.

The whole experience of snooping for stealth was about the means as well as
the ends. It was as much about telephoto lenses, the big binoculars the stealthies
called “hooters,” or the grainy green mystery images produced by night-vision
equipment, as it was about any real craft.

Jim Goodall, who had the declared ambition of collecting a picture of every
airplane the U.S. Air Force had ever flown, complete with tail number—more
than a hundred thousand pictures—claimed an almost sexual rush when he first
saw the Stealth fighter in the winter of 1988. For a traveling salesman of
computer equipment, he had a surprisingly sensual side, and was a sharp dancer
in the Holiday Inn discos he visited on the road. Goodall was often joined on the
fence line at Tonopah by John Andrews, the veteran plastic model designer for
the Testor corporation. In 1986 Testor had released Andrews’s model of the

Stealth fighter, called the “F-19” and based on his glimpses as well as reports
from the other watchers. It was like putting together a police composite sketch of
a wanted man, he said.

The model set off a small storm in Washington. How could a model company
know what America’s most closely guarded secret looked like, when our
lawmakers themselves did not know? Of course, everyone in and around the
black world knew that the last person to be briefed on a project of such high
security was a congressman. You might as well just publish the specs in the
Congressional Register. Angered and embarrassed, congressmen held hearings to
find out how the shape of the plane had leaked. By one account, the Air Force
had to bring a model of the real fighter to Capitol Hill in a locked box,
handcuffed to a guard, to illustrate to them that Andrews’s model was wrong.

But the Air Force and the Skunk Works could only say it was wrong, and not
show it, unless they broke down the very secrecy designed to keep people like
Andrews out.

I drove east out of town toward the base. The road was lined with corrals and
horse stables indistinguishable from houses, and old mines and piles of tailings. I
passed a truck with a bumper sticker that advised if it doesn’t grow, it has to be mined.

I was looking for the base, which did not appear on the maps. The old World
War II main base is the civilian airport now. On the official Nevada state highway
map I had picked up at the Forest Service, the whole area was vaguely named
“game range.” Even the test site and the Nellis range were omitted.

As the buildings thinned out and then stopped, the sight line shrank to a few
hundred yards. The road was marked “Grand Army of the Republic Highway.”
“Ely 163 miles,” I read, “next gas 112 miles.” Soon I saw it to the south: the old
World War II base, now Tonopah Airport, with huge arched hangars and earthen
bunkers suffused in the soft light seeping through the black clouds.

I drove along the near deserted flight line. It seemed dark, almost haunted. It
had been from the beginning a kind of hard-luck base. Trainees, suffering from
the cold, the wind, and the dust, named it “Camp Frosty Balls” and died at
alarming rates. After the base became the site of a B-24 training program, the
bombers kept crashing, too. Once, a machine gun began firing inside one of the
bombers, and when the crew finally got it on the ground, two men were dead in
the turrets. By the end of the war they were testing bizarre bat bombs, crude
radio-directed cruise missiles that foreshadowed the future of the base.

By the time the Stealth arrived in 1984, the Tonopahans had learned the
importance of noting the side upon which their bread was buttered. Their
conspiracy of silence about the secret airplane was like that of a beach town at
the height of the season when a shark is sighted. They paid no note to the
airplanes flying overhead.

Taking off at night, Stealth pilots, like SAC pilots before them, practice-bombed
America in the dark, targeting boat docks in Minnesota and high-rises in Denver.
“We could find Mrs. Smith’s rooming house and take out the northeast corner
guest room above the garage,” one of the pilots boasted.

Still, even those who had trained with the plane were not sure it would work
against real radar. Before the Gulf War, the general sentiment among American
pilots in Saudi Arabia was “I sure hope this Stealth shit works.” Then they saw
the bats that showed up each morning dead on the floor of the hangars, their
sonar fooled by the faceted shapes of the planes, just as radar would be, and they
believed.

On the night of January 17, 1991, a retirement banquet was held to honor Ben
Rich. Halfway around the world, the F-117s were loading up to hit Baghdad.

Soon they would be going after another target—the press. Peter Arnett of CNN,
whose coverage was unbeloved by the Air Force, was using Baghdad’s phone
center. The switchboard went on the target list, and one night, in the ready
rooms at King Khalid Air Force Base, off-duty pilots waited expectantly, sets
tuned to CNN. They counted down the seconds until, right on schedule, their
screens suddenly went to a roaring gray and cheers broke out.

By the time the war was over, the F-117 was a national hero, and the pictures
were no longer distant and grainy. The Stealth was photographed by Annie
Leibovitz, photographer of the stars, for Vanity Fair, in a portfolio together with
Schwarzkopf and Powell and Cheney—war celebrities. Seeing the airplane there
reminded me of those portraits of American Indian chiefs, hauled across the
Atlantic to entertain the court in London, so strangely out of place. Stealth was
now seen openly and it possessed the beauty of the jeep or humvee, or the pup
tent or camouflage.

The sort of claims the airpower advocates always like to make were now made
for the F-117, that in just so many sorties the Stealth had done the work of the
entire bomber fleet of World War II. It reminded me of Curt LeMay, bragging
about the B-47 or the B-58.

After the F-117 was made public, the locals could show their pride openly, and
after the Gulf War, Tonopahans held a victory parade with a thousand people. I
drove past the fire station, which bore a bas-relief of the fighter and a “Home of
the Stealth” plaque.

Yet as soon as the Stealth became a hero, it was gone. The whole wing of
aircraft was transferred in 1992 to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo,
New Mexico. The base at Tonopah was too distant, and keeping the planes secret
was too expensive.

Back on the highway, I was soon spun into a cocoon of snow. As if by
meteorological conspiracy, the whole place had locked down. I drove up to the

fence, paused a reflective moment or two, then turned around.

Back in town I stopped for coffee and cherry pie—$1.50 total—a few feet from
the fire station. At the pay phone, I noticed a plaque on the wall that showed the
outline of the state of Nevada with Iraq laid over it. In the center, roughly where
Dreamland stood, Baghdad was neatly superimposed and marked by red flashes.
“First to strike, January 1991,” the plaque stated proudly. I was confused about
the scale: Was Iraq that small, or Nevada that large?

On the fence line at Tonopah, the guards were usually polite and friendly
enough, unlike the camou dudes at Freedom Ridge, but later the Interceptors
discovered another viewpoint, which for obscure reasons they named Brainwash
Butte. From there, you could see the base, but the view was not a very exciting
one: The long row of identical hangars that had been built for the Stealth fighters
looked from this distance like the little tin sheds of one of those U-Store-It rental
facilities.

Goodall was convinced something new was going on. The security was tighter
than it had been during the height of the Stealth program, and new construction
was under way. Goodall should have known. He had been venturing to the
perimeter, both at Tonopah and Groom Lake, longer than nearly anyone—anyone
except for a very strange man named John Lear.

13. The Decentral Intelligence Agency; or, “Use of Deadly Farce
Authorized”

John Lear’s telephone answering machine does not give his name or number. But
in his voice it offers the following: “To leave a message for Area 51, push one. To
leave one for S-4, push two. The Tonopah Test Range is temporarily unavailable.”

Lear comes on the line, fumbling. He has flown more than 160 types of aircraft
in fifty countries, but he can’t figure out this damn machine and he jokes about
it. Most often these days, Lear can be found in the Holiday Inns surrounding
distant airports. A commercial pilot, he has had a hard time keeping a job since
he became one of the most visible viewers of Dreamland and proponent of UFO
theories.

John Lear journeyed to Dreamland in a Detroit dream machine. In September
1978, he got behind the wheel of his Lincoln Mark IV and drove to the edge of
Groom Lake. At that time, the perimeter still ran along the lake edge, and the
mountains and road were still public land. Lear had long known about the base,
about the U-2 and the Blackbird, and now he had heard rumors that something
else was flying. Ahead of him, the rank of hangars that once held the Blackbirds
were visible along with a few aircraft—a MiG on the flight line, a transport.

He quickly snapped off a few photos and waited. “Then a half hour later this
Klaxon goes off and we see a little trail of dust.” Two vehicles, heading his way.
“I rolled the film up and put it in the ashtray of the Mark IV and put another roll
in the camera and shot the same thing again. A black guy in a red car came up
shouting, ‘What in the hell do you think you are doing?’ I decided to play it cool
as possible. ‘So we’re not supposed to be here, right?’ I said.

“Then I went into a whole line of BS. My dad did the autopilot for the U-2, and
I’ve got a lot of good friends in the SR-71, and so on. I used to live near the
airport in Burbank, and we would always see those three Constellations that went
up here.”

The guard calmed down. “Do you have film?” he asked. Lear pulled the film
out of the camera and gave it to him.

He promised not to intrude again and was allowed to leave. He promptly drove
to Los Angeles, had his stashed film developed, and made big 18-by-20-inch
prints. His black-and-white panorama of the base from across the dry lake, then
covered with a thin layer of water, would become famous, although so many
buildings have been added at Groom that today the picture makes the place seem
crude and primitive.

“Truth,” Lear once wrote. “I can’t tell you what the truth is ... I’m not sure such a
thing exists. If it does exist, the truth is hidden in an incredibly complex,
labyrinthine hall of mirrors with floors of quicksand leading to truly frightening
bizarre and awesome events which have been going on for billions of years, if not
eternity.” John Lear’s writings are apocalyptic, almost hysterical, but in person or
on the phone he is charming and reasonable.

John Lear is the son of Bill Lear, the aviation pioneer who created some 150
major innovations in radio and control systems, along with the eight-track
audiotape and the jet that bears his name.

Born in 1942, before war work made his father rich, John was alternately
spoiled and abused. From the age of twelve he could barely bring himself to
speak to his father, and family meals terrified him. His father would begin by
speaking tenderly but quickly rise to a harangue over some failure of John’s.
Once Bill Lear, dismayed with John’s ducktail haircut, slapped him.

The Lears spent a lot of time in Switzerland. Bill Lear nicknamed their estate
there Le Ranch. John was rarely in any school for more than a year and was
eventually sent to Le Rosey, the posh Swiss academy known as “the school of
kings.”

John Lear was obsessed with flying—perhaps because his father, for all he had
contributed to aviation, held the lowest possible regard for those who actually
flew planes for a living. He made his first flight at fourteen, in 1956, and got his
license and soloed at sixteen. He immediately declared his intention to become a
commercial pilot. He added twin engine, instrument, and aerobatics ratings. In
December 1960 his father’s company, Lear International, hired him as a public
relations representative and pilot.

Then, on June 24, 1961, to get to Bern, Switzerland, on an errand, John rented
a small yellow single-engine biplane from a flying club in Geneva. He had often
made low wing-wagging passes over the dorm at Le Rosey in his Cessna, and now
he came across again, ready to put on a show of aerobatics.

Screaming like a rodeo cowboy to the students below, he began a three-turn
spin at well under a thousand feet, intending to pull up just a few feet from the
ground. After the second turn, with his nose pointed to the ground, he realized he
was too low. He saw a barn out of the corner of his vision. He began to pull back
on the stick, but the plane was still heading down at a 30-degree angle when it
plowed into a wheat field, smashing him into the instrument panel and snapping
the straps of his shoulder harness.

Students pulled him from the wreck. In the ambulance, doctors performed an
emergency tracheotomy. Lear’s larynx had been crushed. Both sides of his jaw
were broken, four front teeth were gone, his heel bones and ankles were crushed,
and each leg had been broken in three places. He spent five hours in surgery in a
Geneva hospital and several days in intensive care. His father, angry and

humiliated, came to the hospital immediately, but never returned during Lear’s
long convalescence.

In 1962, Lear agreed to attend Art Center College in Pasadena, but lost the
$5,000 his father had given him for tuition on a stock tip. In 1964 he was part of
a crew taking a Learjet on a round-the-world flight. The crew went east, violating
Indian airspace, making their longest leg—into Singapore—with only enough fuel
for three minutes in the air. A MiG-17 shadowed them near the Kuril Islands,
then flew off when one of the crew raised a camera with a telephoto lens and
began shooting through the Plexiglas window.

Bill Lear warmed to his son after that flight, but the breach was never really
healed. His will was generous to John’s children—they got 15 percent of his
fortune—but John was left out. At the funeral, John Lear cried uncontrollably.
He eventually became a pilot for Air America—the CIA’s clandestine airline in
Southeast Asia—as well as for domestic carriers.

Growing up in California, Lear was aware of black programs; his father’s
company supported some of them. He knew about planes that flew workers and
equipment from Lockheed in Burbank to the Ranch. In the mid-seventies, Lear
heard rumors from a reporter friend that more interesting things were going on
at Groom Lake. In those days there was practically no security, and Lear was able
to drive almost to the lake itself. “That’s when I took that famous picture of the
lake bed.”

After 1978, Lear became increasingly fascinated with UFOs. He would
eventually drop out of MUFON because the organization wasn’t hard-core enough
for him. He grew close to those who searched for black aircraft, but also to the
UFO believers. In 1987 he published his “Darkside” thesis, the most extreme view
of the dark dangers of aliens, full of tales of secret treaties with the aliens and
their need for human and cattle bodies.

Lear came to believe it all—the underground bases, the tanks with aliens and
alien-human hybrids, the bases on the moon and Mars, MJ-12 and the secret
treaties. He even went on record as believing George Adamski, the early
contactee.

He claimed that aliens mutilated cattle to extract a special enzyme. “The
secretions obtained are then mixed with hydrogen peroxide and applied on the
skin by spreading or dipping parts of their bodies in the solution. The body
absorbs the solution, then excretes the waste back through the skin. The cattle
mutilations ... were for the collection of these tissues by the aliens.”

At the Ultimate UFO Conference in Rachel in 1993, Lear declared, “In 1979,
our alliance with the aliens became a disaster ... Forty-four U.S. scientists and
approximately sixty-six members of Delta Force security personnel were killed by
the aliens in an altercation at a jointly occupied U.S.-alien base north of Los
Alamos, New Mexico ... The exact cause of the altercation is not known, but the

cause of death was listed as external head wounds. This effectively terminated
the alien alliance for an indefinite time.”

The gray aliens of the Lore were simply robots working for a race of aliens that
resembled praying mantises. The government had tried to prepare the public for
release of information on the secret treaties by sponsoring such films as E. T. and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but then relations went sour. MJ-12 was in
disarray and confusion. It was time for the truth to come out, Lear cried.

Lear’s transformation struck many among the Interceptors as suspicious. He had
worked for the CIA in Southeast Asia. He knew many of the Interceptors. He had
introduced Bob Lazar to the newsman George Knapp, who publicized his story.
Lear kept popping up in the stories about Area 51, smack between the stealthies
and the youfers, working each way. It was easy to see a scenario where he was a
disinformationist. He had, after all, worked for Air America. But Lear loved to fly;
he would fly for anyone.

Yet another explanation seemed more convincing. “He has no bullshit filter,”
one of the Interceptors has said. He was both totally credulous and totally
suspicious: Lear never met a plot he didn’t like.

Today Lear no longer wants to get the story out. He doesn’t think the public is
ready. Those who are keeping it all secret know what they are doing. John Lear,
who once challenged the government to come clean, now thinks they may be
right. Yes, he says, there may be disinformation. There may be government
influence in the media. Look at all the films on UFOs. He doesn’t even trust
supermarket tabloids. Somehow they get information early. They manage to take
the kernel of truth and distort it just enough to make it look ridiculous.

Was that, I wondered, the case with a story like the one headlined, top secret: u.s.

HOLDING NAZI WAR CRIMINALS IN SECRET AREA 51 IN NEVADA—AS SLAVE SCIENTISTS TO BUILD WEAPONS! I Went

away shaking my head. I had never thought to suspect that the government
might control the Weekly World News.

The first time they climbed Whitesides Mountain to survey Area 51, Jim Goodall
thought Lear would never make it because he has flat feet. But Lear carried the
sixty-pound pack all the way, and Goodall was the one who had the hard time.

Goodall may have been the most fervent of the Interceptors. As I had, he had
grown up in the shadow of the SAC B-36.

One evening in the summer of 1951, when he was five years old, Goodall felt
his father shaking him awake. There’s something you’ve got to see, his father told
him. Young Jim went outside and heard the rumble of two dozen B-36s and saw
their shadows—“aluminum overcast.” He was fascinated. When the family moved
to the San Francisco area, he found his way to airplanes again. He once sat in the
prototype XF-104 Starfighter in a wind tunnel in Sunnyvale and managed to close

the canopy. Even as a kid he knew enough to be careful of what lever he pulled;
he knew there was such a thing as an ejection seat. Another characteristic of his
personality was already forming: He talked his way out of trouble.

He joined the Air Force in March 1962, and in February 1964 he was at
Edwards working on a communications system. President Johnson had just made
the existence of the Blackbird public, and Goodall saw his first, a YF-12. He still
remembers the date—February 29, 1964. “I was about to get on the Northrop
shuttle to Hawthorne when I heard this incredible roar and ran down to the
flight-line area and looked to the south.”

There Goodall saw a black airplane that he at first thought was the famous X-
15 rocket plane, but from the scale of the people standing beside it he realized it
was a larger craft. The little prop shuttle took off and it flew right over the
taxiing YF-12. The moment he saw the Blackbird framed in the window beneath
him, he realizes now, he imprinted on it like some infant animal. He was locked
in to the fascination of his life. “I could not believe my eyes,” he remembered
later. “At that point I became obsessed.”

After he got out of the Air Force, he would split time between selling computer
hardware on the road and serving in the Air National Guard in Minnesota. As
unit historian, he managed to persuade the Air Force to provide him with an old
Blackbird for the group’s museum. It was an A-12, an agency plane, and Goodall
made it the most meticulously restored and maintained Blackbird in the world. In
time, Goodall was admitted to the Roadrunner’s Club, whose members had
worked on the U-2 or the Blackbirds between 1955 and 1968 at the Ranch.

He has calculated that he’s spent some eighty days on the perimeter—twice the
time Jesus spent in the desert—on Whitesides and Freedom Ridge, then by the
fence line at Tonopah, looking for the Stealth fighter, and later at Brainwash
Butte. He would take one of the first clear pictures of the F-117.

By the time he went up to Whitesides to look down on Dreamland for the first
time with John Lear in the fall of 1988, his obsession had expanded. At some
point during the revelation of the Lazar story, and talking to those who had
worked at the base, Goodall crossed the Ridge—or began to straddle it. He came
to believe in the presence of alien craft, as did John Andrews, his frequent
companion on the trips. “There are things out there that would make George
Lucas green with envy,” he had been told, and he believed.

The key moment in his conversion was a letter Ben Rich had written to him, in
which Rich said that both he and Kelly Johnson believed in UFOs. (But in the
account I had, this was a tease.) Goodall talked often with Rich, who respected
him as a true buff, someone who saw that what the Skunk Works had done was
important history. Rich even appreciated the efforts of Goodall and the others to
get the story out; as he grew older, he saw that the whole system of secrecy had
grown more and more onerous. Rich now felt that it was out of hand, and he

once compared the Interceptors to Ross Perot, shrilly crying for a change in a
system gone wrong.

Goodall had come to believe in the saucers. Something, he wasn’t sure what,
had happened at Roswell. He could believe most of Lazar’s story. Perhaps Lear—
as always, a central figure, the key link—had influenced him, but what for most
of the Interceptors was just an intriguing possibility became a certainty for
Goodall.

It did not reduce his interest in black craft. He was still into every detail of
every possible project. He became the butt of gentle jokes about his constant
obsession with “something new at Tonopah.” He would hide under camou net for
days and come back reporting that security was tighter than during the Stealth
deployment and that some new craft must be flying. But he was not able to pin
down what craft.

John Andrews was constantly enraging the people at the Skunk Works. The very
mention of his name, and his constant letters of inquiry, sent Ben Rich fairly
raving. Kelly Johnson had been outraged when he learned in the early eighties
that Andrews had been allowed to photograph and measure the D-21 Blackbird
drones in storage at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan—the same strange shape I
was told I did not see.

In 1959 he knew all about the U-2 and contacted Lockheed, but he honored the
company’s request not to produce a model. Only in 1962 was a miniature U-2
released by Hawk Models in Chicago.

When Andrews was pursuing the Stealth fighter, an AFOSI officer flew out
from Washington and told him, “Just be patient.” Andrews expects AFOSI to keep
an eye on him; it’s their job. But today, Andrews feels, “things have changed.
Once it was man to man. Now they are hiding behind regulations.”

When his model of the Stealth fighter, billed as the “F-19,” appeared in 1986, it
became the best-selling plastic aircraft model of all time, with a million sold, and
it is now highly sought by collectors. Although Andrews estimates its dimensions
were accurate to about 2 percent of the real thing, and 75 percent accurate in
shape, in fact it turned out to more closely resemble the speculative Russian
Stealth fighter, the experimental MiG Ferret. But some of the buffs, who had long
imagined the craft, would later say it looked more like the idea of Stealth than
the real one.

Andrews was unapologetic. “The model helped keep the security of the
airplane, because everybody was looking at it, saying, That’s what it looks like.”

“But,” I interposed, “what if you had been more accurate?”

He had no answer.

Andrews next turned out his model of the long-rumored “Aurora” spy plane, with

its pulser engine. This came directly from his visits to the perimeter. “I’ve slept
on the top of Whitesides,” he said, “and heard the pulser in December 1992. You
cannot mistake it. It has a very low frequency; there’s nothing like it.”

To some of the Interceptors, though, the appearance of the Testor company’s
Lazar saucer showed that Andrews had crossed the line.

“I’m quite comfortable with Lazar,” Andrews has said, and he seems to believe
most of Lazar’s story. He’d consulted with Lazar and Jon Farhat, a computer
graphic designer who was working on the long-gestating film about Lazar, in the
development of the model.

Andrews’s model of the Lazar saucer was skillfully packaged so that no one
could tell just how seriously it was intended. “Area S4 UFO Revealed!” ran the
copy on the box. “A scale model kit of the alien craft allegedly hidden in Nevada
by the U.S. Government as described by eyewitness and former government
physicist, Bob Lazar.” Paint and cement not included. Skill Level Two. Sixteen-
page full-color book included. “Type of vehicle: Anti-matter reaction, gravity
amplification, interstellar craft. Made of metallic substance of unknown nature,
containing an antimatter reactor to bend space-time, fueled by element 115.”
Rendered in 1/48 scale, it was made up of twenty-three plastic pieces, including
a transparent top to offer a view of the antimatter reactor. Testor also carefully
stated on the box that “we can neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the
craft on which the model is based.

It was the saucer Lazar had nicknamed “the sport model,” and it sold out
immediately, thanks perhaps to the fact that Larry King displayed the model on
his desk during the October 1994 program he filmed from outside Area 51.

The Testor model made Lazar’s tale tangible. Once one had seen such detailed
plastic parts, it was harder not to believe in the existence of the real craft.
Andrews seemed to buy into the “trickle out” theory—all those bits and pieces,
they were what the government wanted us to know, so we would be less shocked
when the whole truth comes out.

As Andrews’s interest in flying saucers grew, his letters to Ben Rich and others
at the Skunk Works irritated them even more. Then Rich finally sent Andrews
and Goodall that letter in which he admitted, “Yes, I believe in UFOs, and so did
Kelly Johnson.

“Yes,” Rich continued, “I call them UnFunded Opportunities ”—in other words,
Lockheed ideas the damn fool Air Force wouldn’t pay for. It was a joke, and not a
kind one.

After he finished the Stealth fighter model, Andrews began to hike up Whitesides
Mountain, sometimes with Lear and Goodall. Now he was looking for Aurora, or
whatever it was that left the doughnut-on-a-rope contrails. After PsychoSpy
moved to Rachel and began to publicize the viewpoints, the numbers of viewers

grew. As in complexity theory, the first individuals evolved into a self-organizing
group of watchers who would later call themselves the Dreamland Interceptors.
The name was taken from the Intercepts newsletter Steve Douglass published for
the secret-aircraft buffs and military monitors who eavesdropped on aircraft
radios on their scanners.

Andrews, having watched black planes since the days of the U-2 and having
been out on the perimeter since 1988, came to be viewed as the most veteran and
venerable of the Interceptors. “It’s like a little CIA out there,” he said. “We collect
bits and pieces and put them together in a mosaic.”

The Interceptors developed their own loose camaraderie and culture over the
course of many visits. As their totem, the Interceptors adopted the aluminum
lawn chair—that icon of suburban backyard America. It was one thing to say you
had seen the base—everyone somehow seemed to feel, doing it, that they were
among the first, the proud, the few—but the real badge of honor was to carry
that chair up there.

use of deadly force authorized, read the signs on the perimeter, citing the Internal
Security Act of 1950—also known notoriously as the McCarran Act, named, as is
the airport in Las Vegas, for Nevada senator Pat McCarran, although it was
promoted and written mostly by then Congressman Richard Nixon and Senator
Karl Mundt. It struck me as appropriate to think of Richard Nixon writing the
perimeter warnings.

The law’s language includes one of the clearest and most specific statements of
the outlook and assumptions of the Cold Warrior:

There exists a world Communist movement which in its origins, its
development, and its present practice, is a world-wide revolutionary movement
whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups
(governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other
means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in
the countries throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide
Communist organization.

Before Glenn Campbell discovered Freedom Ridge in 1993, the best view of
Dreamland was from Whitesides Mountain; farther away, after Freedom Ridge
fell victim to the expansion of the perimeter, there was Tikaboo. Tikaboo became
the agreed-upon standard for the measurement of the height of other peaks, the
strenuousness of other hikes, and in planning expeditions to observe the base at
Tonopah, the nuclear test site, miscellaneous mysterious electronic stations, and
sites of aircraft wreckage. Visitors speculated on areas they could not reach, such
as the fabled Cheshire airstrip, which was said to remain invisible until special
lights were turned on. Or Base Camp, a mysterious facility north of Warm Springs
and Highway 6, or Site IV, deep in between Tonopah and the restricted area
around Groom. It was the home, Agent X reported, “of terrain-following radar

development, covert testing of purloined Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and Chinese radars
and ECM ... making sure that they wouldn’t jam fuses on our nuclear weapons
and disable our penetrating bombers’ electronic navigation and countermeasures.
It seems to be an integral part of the Nellis Range Complex electronic warfare
and evaluation capabilities along with the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat
Range.”

The mock spies—“a little CIA”—and the jesters of Dreamland watched the
reliquary of the Cold War with whimsy and cynicism. They wore the same camou
as the camou dudes. They reminded me of Marx’s famous statement that history
happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Their production
was a send-up of the Cold War; their spirit like that suggested on the old Firesign
Theatre album cover bearing the revolutionary banners of Marx (Groucho) and
Lennon (John).

Of course they were also just another of those self-directing American groups
Tocqueville had observed, revealing a nation of joiners and near-obsessives. I
recognized myself in them: We had been the kids who put together too many
aircraft models and spent our time at the library looking at Aviation Week instead
of reading the Hardy Boys.

Among them were journalists and buffs, private researchers and
conservationists. Peter Merlin, an aviation archaeologist, found the crash sites of
old planes in the desert and ferreted out details and documents. He carried a key
ring made of bits of famous planes he’d found. Tom Mahood, the former civil
engineer from Irvine, spent days assembling careful chronologies and descriptions
of secret places like the radar cross-section facilities. He collated official
brochures about Tonopah and studied old maps.

Agent X, a former Coast Guard agent and reporter for such magazines as Gung
Ho and The Nose, came from his home in Juneau, Alaska, and spent days driving
around the perimeters in rented convertibles turned into makeshift off-road
vehicles. The cars usually came back to the rental agency in appalling shape.
Once Agent X wrecked a Buick LeSabre on a cutoff from Groom Road, sliding into
a ditch doing 60 miles per hour. His report made it sound like a crash of some
exotic secret prototype: “The LeSabre rose in a 45-degree left roll before hanging
for a moment and falling back to the desert floor.”

The Interceptors had no clubhouse or Raccoon Lodge. Their social organization
could be described as ad hoc. They had no regular or official membership and
only the most general of shared values and beliefs. They were against excess
secrecy, but without the mystery they wouldn’t have been on the perimeter.

Some derided the youfers, some were curious and tentative, and for many the
saucers stories were a little pilot flame of possibility that kept them all going—
the Biggest Story in the History of Mankind. “I’m a hardware guy,” Jim Goodall
said, but he was willing to speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial

hardware.

Many of the Interceptors admitted that people with more vital social and
personal lives did not end up hanging around the perimeter. Some saw looking
for airplanes or secret saucer bases as just another way to get outdoors, camp, get
some fresh air.

There were those who would fly in light planes around the perimeter, an
enterprise that felt daring and exciting but offered very little new perspective or
information. They visited places like Mount Charleston, where the wreckage of
the C-54 that crashed in 1955 on its way to Groom Lake still lay tangled. The
circle of the Interceptors widened. In August 1994, some sixty people mustered
on the Ridge for what was billed as Groomstock, which included a former pilot
from the Blackbird program and UFO buffs.

Once, some of the Interceptors arranged to take a tour of the Nevada Test Site
with Derek as their guide. They were taken to the Command Post, with those
Naugahyde chairs, the long oval tables, the maps and video screens, and given
box lunches. Derek seemed in a hurry to get them into the post, although there
was nothing in particular happening, no special event. Only later did it strike Bill
Sweetman that they had been carefully kept inside so that they would not see
something flying overhead. When he asked Derek, “What kind of pumpkins
would we have turned into if we had been outside at noon?” Derek was sheepish.

After the tour, they drove all the way down to Los Angeles and crashed at the
Minister’s place in the Hollywood Hills in the wee hours of the morning—only to
be tossed awake a couple of hours later by the big L.A. earthquake.

The demographics of the Interceptors tended to overlap those of engineers, as
the test site overlapped Dreamland. The techie connection brought with it a
cynicism that resembled the mercurial charge of a semiconductor. It faded in and
out, suspended possibility and speculation like a force field.

The group pursued knowledge by the accumulative and comparative methods
of any good intelligence agency. For the Interceptors, simply laying out the
known and marking where the unknown began—patrolling the perimeter, so to
speak—was enough. Some compiled elaborate grids and tables recording
information about sightings, crashes, types of aircraft known and suspected,
sometimes right down to tail numbers. In this they had much in common with
obsessives anywhere on the planet.

If the Interceptors parodied the CIA’s assemblage of information from bits and
pieces, they also parodied its surrogate identities and the cult and camaraderie of
secret military units. They took on alter egos, in the manner of blues musicians or
gangsters, with names to match, mostly e-mail nicknames. The alter egos both
resembled and mocked cover names of the UFO informants “Condor” or “Falcon.”
They created insignia—pins and patches—as if they were a real military unit.
They developed their own personal subset of the Lore.

“It’s about two and a half Tikaboos,” an Interceptor would say. “But how far is
it LeBaronable?” the response would come, the rented Chrysler convertible
favored by Agent X lending a mobility standard for the dirt roads in the area.

One of PsychoSpy’s sources declared that the aliens had bequeathed technology
to humans through Hungarians—atomic physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller,
aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, weren’t they all Hungarian? And the
aliens spoke a language like High Hungarian. This was a twist on an old joke
from the Manhattan Project, when someone noted how many Hungarians stood
among the top ranks of the project scientists—and how strange their Magyar
tongue was. They must be from Mars! The joke delighted the Interceptors, and
they enjoyed adding details to it. Visiting Budapest, Glenn Campbell found more
than four hundred Lazars listed in the phone book.

Agent Zero had special decoder rings machined up that purported to translate
Hungarian into English. They were made of titanium, just as the Blackbirds were,
then anodized in a special secret fluid to lend them a silver-blue sheen that
seemed to me to reflect the whole happy glitzy fascination with Area 51. The
special secret fluid was Coca-Cola.

It was like putting together a mosaic, John Andrews had said, and mosaic was
just what the military feared, how they justified concealing the smallest detail.
Mosaic was right in another way: Mosaic was the name of the first browser
program for the World Wide Web. The information Interceptors gathered found
its most natural home on the Internet, in alt.conspiracy.area51, the Skunk Works
digest, and, later, on elaborate Web pages.

It turned a lot of watchers into philosophers. A Washington State journalist
named Terry Hansen published his musings on the Internet under the title “The
Philosophy of Dreamland,” taking an epigraph from Jim Morrison (“On the
perimeter, there are no stars”). “So set aside your heartfelt prejudices and
incredulity for the moment,” Hansen intoned, “and come along on an
epistemological adventure into the tangled and shadowy jungle of officially
forbidden knowledge. Here, rational analysis can no longer be considered a
reliable guide. This is a realm ruled by the high priests of the intelligence
community who simply do not like us poking our noses into their business, even
though we’re footing the bill for it ... Any hopes for certainty must be left behind
at the outer boundaries of consensus reality, for we are about to explore the
enigma of Dreamland.”

As high-technology shrine or secret saucer base, Area 51 took on an existence
on-line as a virtual place, a “notional” country. The buffs were rebuilding
Dreamland on-line in HTML and reverse-engineering it in data.

It was Vannevar Bush, the very man reputed to have been head of the secret
Majestic, or MJ-12, group, who first laid out the vision of the personal computer
and its new ways of organizing information. In July 1945, in a celebrated article

in the Atlantic called “As We May Think,” Bush described his vision of the
Memex, a personal memory or information device. In the process, he projected
something that sounds like CD-ROM and the Internet. Bush’s ideas would inspire
those who created the personal computer and the Internet, people like Douglas
Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, who read the Atlantic article in a
straw hut in the South Pacific when he was in the military. Bush believed that the
human mind operated less by classification and organization, the traditional view
of thought, than by association. “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to
the next that is suggested by the association of thought, in accordance with some
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Yet the speed of action,
the intricacy of the trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond
all else in nature.”

Bush had predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready¬
made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be
dropped into the Memex and there amplified.” He predicted the rise of a special
profession of innovator to mark such trails and distribute them to individual
Memex machines, “a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the
task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common
record.” This anticipated the strategy of the Interceptors. They were trailblazers
to documents and information of an unusual or speculative nature.

The assemblage of extremely detailed and factual studies, notes the historian
Richard Hofstadter, looking back over American history in the light of
McCarthyism, has long been characteristic of conspiracist groups. From these
sometimes rickety, jerry-built edifices of fact, the great leap to a wider conclusion
is made—a leap of suspicion that is the dark side of a leap of faith. The
information the Interceptors would assemble in time lines and lists and
collections was like nothing so much as a conspiracist assemblage. But not
everyone was willing to climb to the top and make the leap they had prepared.

The Interceptors knew something was happening when they showed up in the
movies. The 1996 film Broken Arrow contained a reference to “the guys in lawn
chairs just watching for something to take off.” In the film, a bomber and a nuke
go astray, and the first official instinct is to cover it all up, keep it secret. But, a
young aide warns, “Don’t forget the guys in lawn chairs” watching all the bases,
who will notice a bomber leave and not return. Area 51 had crept into the
mainstream of popular culture with a speed that surprised even the hardiest
Interceptors.

The de facto leader of the Interceptors’ Nevada branch, Glenn Campbell, aka
PsychoSpy, aka the Desert Rat, aka “not the singer,” was a controversial figure in
the town of Rachel. He irked some locals by failing to commit clearly on the UFO
question, and some Interceptors were dismayed by his limited interest in secret
aircraft. The saucers were taken as certainty by the Travises and Chuck Clark. It

was popular among the Interceptors to see Clark as Campbell’s opposite, and to
view PsychoSpy’s Research Center and the Inn where the Travises and Clark held
forth as two poles, one honest and inquiring, the other opportunistic and
mercenary. But it was not so simple: They seemed to be distorted reflections of
each other rather than opposites. Campbell’s patch and guide were also
commercial enterprises, and Clark’s efforts were certainly philosophical.
Campbell needed the black aircraft that bored him; Clark and the Travises,
playing out their interview roles over and over, had come to need the saucers.
One sometime resident compared them to the two drug connections rumored to
be found at either end of town, competing with each other in the sale of crystal
meth, a popular antidote to desert ennui.

But if he figured as the Hamlet of the hamlet of Rachel, Campbell was also the
village explainer, laying out the mythologies, systematizing the lore. Glenn
Campbell was the closest thing in Rachel to Joseph Campbell. In his role as
PsychoSpy, he was drawn to the tales as parables.

In one tale, he was lying in the backseat of his car parked along Mailbox Road
when he first saw them: strange spaceships, dotted with lights, hovering. They
flew right over the car. It was only later, after thinking about the vivid memories
he had had, that he realized he had been lying in a position from which he could
not have seen ships overhead. He used the story as an example of how easy it
was to delude yourself into thinking you had seen something you had not, how
tricky the business of seeing things in the sky near the Black Mailbox was.

Campbell dressed in camou outfits bought at Hahn’s Surplus in Las Vegas and
talked a lot about his selection of MREs—“meals ready to eat,” latter-day K-
rations. Sometimes he suggested a grown-up version of the kid in your
neighborhood who wanted to play soldiers all the time.

He said that he was not a UFO buff or Stealth fan but a philosopher and
inquirer into the nature of truth. His business card read, “Area 51 Research
Center. UFOs—Gov’t Secrets—Philosophy—Psychology etc.” He would make
himself the chief researcher into Area 51, an advocate against secrecy, an
extremely useful talking head for television crews, and a spy. “I am spying,” he
would say, “on behalf of the American people.”

He had quickly run afoul of Joe and Pat Travis and been exiled to a trailer at
the other end of town. The story going around was that Joe, drunk one night, had
burst into the trailer and put a gun to Glenn’s head. Campbell’s story was that
Joe had come in “in a drunken rage” and accused him of killing the Inn’s
business.

Before I came to Nevada, Steve Douglass had told me about PsychoSpy. I
phoned and Campbell sent me a copy of his Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. It compared
well with the better travel guides to Europe. The very idea that someone had
created a travel guide to a place that did not officially exist was exquisitely

appealing to all of us fascinated by Dreamland. In his write-up of the Guide for
the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy and Government Bulletin, Steve
Aftergood praised “its deliberate epistemological murkiness.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Campbell scrawled on the cover of the
copy he sent me. Did I seem naive? Had he marked me as a skeptic? It was the
first sign of his tendency—useful for dealing with the press—to chose his words
carefully to match his audience.

I first met him at the trailhead to Freedom Ridge. He was standing beside his
battered subcompact car, still with Massachusetts plates and covered with dozens
of little stickers from places he had visited. We gave each other a look. I think his
was suspicious. I know mine was. I wanted to like him, but from that first
moment at the trailhead I had found it difficult to warm to him. The Minister,
another Interceptor, suggested that he was trying to overcome his basic shyness
in that diffident way shy people often assume. He often had the air of a hired
guide, the park ranger of Dreamland, but in time I came to think of him as a
jester and as, in that grand American locution, a gadfly. A philosopher, a
naturalist of the unnatural, he sometimes suggested a parodic Thoreau, with
Groom Dry Lake as his Walden Pond.

If you were simplifying the story of Dreamland for a TV movie, and needed to
combine all the Interceptors into one character, Campbell might be that
character. He gave good sound bites to the visiting syndicated TV shows, varying
his tone, patiently doing retakes. In PsychoSpy, producers could imagine all the
Interceptors’ modes and dreams wrapped up in this one guy.

Campbell had established what he called “the Whitesides Defense Council,” to
fight the military’s takeover of the viewpoints there and on Freedom Ridge, and
then “the Secrecy Oversight Council.” He skillfully tapped into the skepticism
toward the federal government, one of the few common bonds among Nevadans,
and established a middle ground between political right and left, and between
the youfers and stealthies who wanted to break down the walls of what they
deemed unnecessary government secrecy. He named the ridge he had discovered
Freedom Ridge, because who could be against freedom?

Nevadans have long resented federal ownership of the vast majority of their
lands, even though the feds pump billions of dollars into the state economy
through the military, the DOE, and other agencies. What Mark Twain wrote in
Roughing It about nineteenth-century Nevadans pretty much holds true today.
When they finally achieved statehood, Twain said, “The people were glad to have
a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having
strangers from distant states put in authority over them—a sentiment that was
natural enough.”

Soon Campbell began distributing a newsletter called The Desert Rat by mail
and on the Net. He reported on hearings, arrests of perimeter crossers, and Area

51 rumor and lore. He told of strange characters that appeared in Rachel, like
Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II from the planet Draconis, who said he was a “being
of Light” (although, PsychoSpy editorialized, “we touched him and found him to
be quite solid”). Merlin was on a mission to promote the coming “Golden Age,”
when the aliens would be integrated into our society and we humans would
evolve into a higher form. Campbell came up with an odd source from within the
test site: Jarod, who claimed to have worked on “flight simulators” for the alien
craft hidden at S-4.

Campbell kept showing up at hearings and working the media, irritating the
hell out of the military and the Lincoln County sheriffs department. And he
fought the BLM’s efforts to seize more land by demanding that the Air Force
explain why it needed the land, what it was doing in Dreamland. He bent a
classic bureaucratic catch-22 back on itself: The government needed the land to
keep secret what it was doing on the base, but because what it was doing was
secret it could not explain why it needed the land.

Campbell rightly understood that the hardest thing for the military to deal with
was derision. His best line was his response to the signs on the perimeter and the
apparatus of secrecy they stood for: “Use of deadly farce authorized.”

Glenn Campbell and Jim Goodall designed their own version of a uniform patch
for the workers at Groom. It portrayed an Aurora-like craft sweeping up from a
dry lake with mountains behind it, and the words “Dreamland Groom Lake Test
Site.” Soon we heard the patch was for sale at a store in the Pentagon mall. Glenn
did not hesitate to print it up on T-shirts and caps and sell it through his catalog
and in his “Research Center.” Then it was reproduced in several magazines as if it
were official, as if it were actually worn by the camou dudes and others inside
the base.

A year or so later I was in Nevada again. I phoned Glenn from Las Vegas. “Well,”
he said, “I’ll have to be in the Research Center all day.” This tone of pressing
business was new.

The Research Center was Glenn’s trailer, at the south end of Rachel, and I knew
it well. “I’ve never seen the Research Center,” I said, trying to keep the archness
out of my voice.

When I pulled up to the little trailer, I noticed junk outside—a cow skull, with
bits of skin and hair still clinging to it, and some old aircraft parts. Inside on the
ceiling was a large map of Dreamland and surrounding airspace, and a big new
Macintosh sat on a table. On the wall was a quotation from anthropologist
Margaret Mead about how a few people with conviction can change the world.
On the floor were strewn old socks.

Secret aircraft interested Campbell barely at all. He had once said that if the
legendary Aurora landed in front of him, taxied up, and ran over his foot, he

would pay it no attention.

He handed me an article called “Effects of UFOs upon Human Beings.” It dealt
with odd electrical effects—radio static, flashing lights—such as those seen in the
pickup truck scene in Close Encounters. I noticed that the author was named
“McCampbell,” and the similarity made me wonder if this guy was not some kind
of doppelganger of Glenn’s, what he wished he could be—if only he could
believe. It was a measured, mostly scientific report on radio interference, sunburn
effects, electrical shorts, and other phenomena reported by those who had
encountered UFOs.

There were those who believed Campbell was a closet youfer, but he became
increasingly skeptical of Lazar. Gene Huff, Lazar’s pal, took to calling Campbell
“Goober” on-line. “He tends to alienate people,” said Huff. “He’s a strange bird, a
weird guy. He told me he moved out here because of the Bob Lazar story, and
now he attacks Bob. I call his operation the UFO division of the Mickey Mouse
Club. It may be fine for the shitkickers and dickheads in Rachel, but not for the
rest of the world.”

Campbell had alienated Huff by publishing transcripts of Lazar’s statements at
the Ultimate UFO Conference in Rachel, when Huff believed that he was the only
one with the right to do so. Huff took a kind of pride in defending Lazar. He
made Campbell a particular target, hinting darkly of immoral, even criminal
behavior in his background. The word among the Interceptors was that each had
something on the other. Campbell had negative information on Lazar’s
credibility; Huff had info on Campbell. It was a parody of MAD, mutual assured
destruction, so neither could use the stories, even if they were true. “Well,” Steve
Douglass remarked wryly when he heard of these supposed skeletons, “I guess we
all have our little Groom Lakes.”

Campbell made life difficult for the Air Force by challenging its takeover of
additional land, including the Freedom Ridge overlooks. But his whole media act
as “searcher for the nature of truth” was as pretentious as his dressing in camou
gear and eating MREs.

On one trip to Tonopah, PsychoSpy hurled himself up against the chain-link
fence and the guard quickly dropped to a crouch and focused his M-16. Usually
you could josh with the guards, but all of sudden the casualness was gone.
Everyone in the party was shocked.

The guard had grown increasingly irritated. On their radios, the dudes referred
to Campbell as “our friend” or “the editor.” Inevitably, he managed to get himself
arrested. Accompanying yet another reporter and camera crew, he led the dudes
on a chase that ended with the group pinned down by a sandblasting chopper,
then cut off by one of the dude mobiles. When they asked for the film, PsychoSpy
locked the doors of his Toyota. They finally forced him out and confiscated his
film.

He went to court, serving as his own attorney in a thirty-eight-dollar suit he
bought at a Mormon thrift shop in Las Vegas. He argued that by not returning his
film the dudes were in effect concealing evidence of a crime: They had flown the
helicopter that sandblasted him below the five-hundred-foot FAA-mandated
minimum altitude.

It was all to no avail, as he knew it would be, and he was fined. His community
service included working on a history of Rachel and helping out at the senior
center.

After Freedom Ridge was closed off in the spring of 1995, and perhaps finding his
welcome in Rachel wearing thin, PsychoSpy rented an apartment in a complex in
Las Vegas, near the airport. From his front window he could see the Janet flights
taking off and landing on their way to and from Groom. He called this his “Las
Vegas Research Center.” It was a characteristically defiant gesture.

If he sometimes seemed smug, feeding off his appearances in the media even as
he spoke disdainfully of its operations, he was better than anyone at cutting to
key points about the base. Wrapping himself in his cloak of citizen advocate, he
argued that the importance of the Lazar story was not the existence or
nonexistence of UFOs in government hands. What mattered was that there could
be. Policies of secrecy had made it possible, and those policies were in defiance
of all-American moral law and tradition.

PsychoSpy wrote that he—except he used the editorial or royal “we”—
approached aliens-at-the-test-site stories “as folklore.” “Rather than assuming a
story is false until proven true,” he stated in The Desert Rat, “we proceed as
though it were true, collecting information about it until we reach an
insurmountable roadblock or inconsistency.” No lie, he was confident, could
“reproduce all the rich interconnections of reality.

“As long as a story remains interesting in itself, like a well-constructed novel,
we are willing to set aside the issue of truth and go along for the ride,” he added,
sounding somewhat like Jung himself.

The real problem was that the military and the government—or whatever
conspiracy you wanted to postulate—had been able to establish enough secrecy
to make the possibility of flying saucers at Area 51 vital for thousands of citizens.
At Groom Lake, airplanes had been chopped up, burned, and buried; entire
programs were erased from the record. They had kept the first spy satellite secret
for more than thirty years and the National Reconnaissance Office, the
organization that operated it, unacknowledged and virtually unknown for even
longer. They had managed to hide the NRO’s “stealth building”—only feet from
the strip mall and spec office parks around Dulles Airport—from Congress itself.
They had kept secret for years the post-nuclear-war presidential redoubt in the
basement of the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Excessive secrecy left the way
open for—fairly demanded—all kinds of conspiratorial speculations. If nothing

was seen, much would be dreamed.

Lurking on the Internet, as on a high-elevation viewpoint, I saw Dreamland
taking on a new, shadowy presence in cyberspace. Sometimes active pilots would
appear. There were B-1B crews, chattering and bragging. A few days later they
suddenly disappeared. I had the very firm impression that a higher-up had
spotted the postings. The B-l is known to airmen as “the Bone” and its crews, by
extension, as “Bonemen,” if not “Boners,” men of camaraderie and enthusiasm
who write poetry “on beer drinking, cannibalism, and such.” Perhaps the colonel
was not pleased to read about a near-supersonic flight with live ordnance, as in a
message headed “Lots o’ Iron”: “Yesterday, we were 500AGL, .998 Mach, very
very near civilized establishments en route to the ft Sill IP with 84; live eggs on
board—that, my friends, is the sound of freedom!”

Soon enough, there were not only newsgroups about Dreamland, like
alt.conspiracy.area51, but websites devoted to it. Glenn Campbell had previously
learned that some mail to Area 51 was directed to “Pittman Station, Henderson.”
Henderson is a town just east of Las Vegas, the site of a defunct post office that
once received mail for the base. One buff plugged “Pittman Station” into the Alta
Vista web searcher. It came back with a 1990 NASA press release listing
astronaut candidates. Pittman Station was listed as the site of employment of a
Capt. Carl E. Walz. Another buff then did a search for “Walz” and came up with a
detailed NASA biography. You could read that Walz’s parents lived in South
Euclid, Ohio, and that he had graduated from Charles T. Brush High School in
Lyndhurst, Ohio. You could also find that “in July 1987 he was transferred to Las
Vegas, Nevada, where he served as a Flight Test Program Manager at Detachment
3, Air Force Flight Test Center.” The Air Force Flight Test Center is located at
Edwards Air Force Base, apparently with a detached unit at Groom Lake, with a
Pittman Station mail drop: It appeared that Walz had worked in Dreamland. Had
he flown Aurora? Been a test pilot for some other project? None of that was
answered.

Glenn drew it all together. Having previously established that AFFTC “has a
presence at Groom ... now we know that it is Detachment 3 that is housed there.
This is consistent with the designation on the cover of the Area 51 Security
Manual of ‘DET 3 SP,’ with ‘SP’ perhaps referring to ‘Security Police.’ ”

You could magnify a little detail into a live connection. But you could also
magnify rumor—and there were certainly frauds and weird entries. It was not
always easy to recognize them, and even when you did, sometimes they were
more interesting than the accurate postings.

One man described his “grandpa,” who had worked, he said, at Area 51 or at
Tonopah, he wasn’t sure which. The grandfather would never discuss his work,
but when he was dying and had been “given Morphone and other asiditives
[sic],” he finally talked. He had been given a “metal” for his work. After his

death, “an onslought of Military personnel took the Metal, the Bodys and the
licke” away.

Another posting offered a chronology of runway expansions at the base that
read like a parody of Tom Mahood’s painstaking chronologies of events at Groom
or his biography of Bob Lazar. The name of the poster was suspicious to begin
with: “Robert Harry Hover.” Is that “hover,” as in the way a saucer hangs?

The detailed listing buzzed with numbers: runway lengths and elevations,
magnetic bearings in degrees, minutes, and seconds. The startling and suggestive
things are slipped in between the numbers so that you almost don’t notice their
implications: “Only 70 Base Personnel knew of this place.” “1964 Anti-gravitation
device test. Unsuccessful,” and the Delphi “1970 Occurrence Friday, September
11, at 10 pm for one-half hour.”

A British UFO magazine published a photograph its editors believed depicted
the Aurora refueling over the North Sea in formation with F-llls. Steve Douglass
was suspicious. He made some phone calls, checked details of the aircraft types,
even the engines, and proved it a hoax. But the hoax was intentional: The picture
had been produced by Bill Rose, an astronomer and photographer, for the English
magazine Astronomy Now, specifically to demonstrate how easy it was to fake
photos of UFOs or secret airplanes. The UFO magazine had taken it from
Astronomy Now without permission and, in effect, proved Rose’s point.

Another time, Steve received an anonymous letter containing what the sender
said were images of two hypersonic aircraft prototypes. The fuzzy photocopy
showed two fighter-size aircraft said to be code-named “SANTA.” He discovered
that the picture actually showed two prototype miniature deep-diving submarines
designed and built by an oceanographer named Graham Hawkes.

The more cases like this you read about, the more time you spend on the
perimeter, the more you tend to believe in the native human tendency to
exaggerate, embroider, and deceive. There were apparently more nuts than were
dreamed of in my philosophy at least. Dreamland expanded one’s sense of the
native human tendency to duplicity—and to spite.

One morning, a group of the Interceptors met near Indian Springs. The day’s hike
was to the top of Mount Stirling, one of the few places from which you can
glimpse—albeit from forty or fifty miles away—Papoose Lake and Lazar’s “S-4,”
ostensible site of saucer test flights and hangars hidden inside cliffs.

At the base of the trail, I met the Swiss Mountain Bat, the most distantly based
of the Interceptors (he is in fact Swiss), in his rented Ford Explorer. The Bat had
read a book called Above Top Secret, which recounted Lazar’s and other tales of
secret facilities cut into cliffs and mountains and deserts in the western United
States. The Bat did not find it so hard to believe in hangars inside cliffs at S-4,
with door panels camouflaged as rock. An American might be dubious, but the

Bat had done his three years in the Swiss military and seen all the underground
hangars and command centers in a country whose laws require the provision of a
bomb shelter beneath every newly constructed building. “We’ve done that all
over the country,” cut into the mountains “like Swiss cheese,” he said with a big
smile as we bounced up the Forest Service road.

Sure enough, when he got back to Switzerland, the Bat mailed me photographs
of some of the Swiss installations. They appeared as rocky cliffs at first glance,
but on closer viewing you could pick up perceptible lines, as if discerning a
servant’s door in the library of a gentleman’s mansion.

He worked for an insurance company, but he seemed to live from one visit to
Dreamland to another. He sold his photos of S-4 and Groom Lake to the UFO
magazines. He appeared in many of the pictures and would show up on the
covers of UFO magazines grinning behind his big camera lens and binoculars, in
full camouflage. He regularly e-mailed the Interceptors back in the States from
the Bat HQ, as he called his home. But he had another agenda, which was to
prove that his country of chocolate bars and gold bars, clocks and banks and
burghers, had UFOs too, and cover-ups.

“It’s no longer about chocolate and cheese in our tiny li’l country now,” he
crowed in his e-mails. “Very strange things go bump in deep night over here,
too.” He told of mystery radar blips and lights.

The Explorer bounced up the narrow road, but the hump between tracks was
rising with the elevation. Soon we were almost straddling it. When we pulled to a
stop, the sweet smell of burning sage and pinyon came from beneath the vehicle
where plants had been scorched by the hot exhaust.

During the steep climb, we kept our eyes on the ground, on droppings of
various animals, on red lichens—the same color as Lazar’s element 115.
PsychoSpy, wearing a porkpie hat from Kmart, breathed heavily. Tom Mahood,
his eyes deep-set beneath an Aussie hat, led the way. “If they were serious,” he
said as the vistas began to open occasionally through the trees, “Lazar and Huff
should have come up here before they went public.” They could have brought a
video camera and gotten some proof of the flights, taped the rising saucers. Now
even Lazar thought the saucers had been moved.

The top came suddenly. A turn and then a sweeping view from 8,200 feet;
framed by pine boughs with their beads of sap visible like fresh rain, the lakes
slid among the distant overlapping ranges. “There it is,” Mahood said. “The most
secret place in America.”

We sat and recovered and ate. I noticed with a start that the bags of trail mix
and peanuts had swollen into little pillows at over 8,000 feet, transparent
balloons.

No one really believed he would see flying saucers, or even hangar doors. Nor

were we here to disprove anything. It was the possibility that justified the trip.
Possibility expanded our credulity.

Maps were consulted. Mahood had marked the borders of the test site and
range in fluorescent pink and orange and, with his engineer’s eye, had carefully
worked out the sight lines from Mount Stirling to Papoose Lake and other vistas.
He squatted on a folding canvas-and-metal stool and aligned his telescope.

The test site spread out below: the geometric assemblage of Mercury, the
company town where I remembered seeing ads in the cafeteria for bowling
leagues. Highway 95 showed the silver slugs of trucks and the black flecks of
cars. Near the entrance to the test site, you could see the holding pen where so
many demonstrators had been sequestered over the years. To the east were the
Ranger Mountains and a strip of public land. On an earlier trip, the Interceptors
had tried to get up to the edge of the test site that way, but it was rougher and
longer than it had looked, and some of them nearly collapsed for lack of water.

You could see the stubs of towers where atomic blasts had been set off, Yucca
Flat, Frenchman Flat, the barely visible Command Post and assembly buildings. I
imagined what it would have been like to watch the atmospheric tests from up
here, to see the mushroom clouds rising from the plains, to feel—half a minute,
forty-five seconds later—the vast wave of shock and heat there amid the pines.

But our attention was focused on the light strip of Papoose Lake. We should
have been looking straight at the wall with the sand-colored doors of secret
saucer hangars, pitched at a 30-degree angle, that Lazar had talked of. As the sun
moved lower, the light molded the hills into fuller shapes. The landscape seemed
to puff up and grow fuller, more sculpted, as if inflating like our little bags of
food.

“That would be the way to walk in,” Mahood said. “Up Nye Canyon, across
Frenchman Flat.”

To the far right you could see the airfield at Indian Springs with its little x of
runways half-flattened like a folding chair from the perspective. We saw a light
aircraft pass by. Then someone caught sight of what looked like a building, a
blockhouse-like structure, beyond the edge of the test site.

“As the afternoon wore on, they could see more and more,” someone intoned
in the voice of a television narrator. The whole experience of Interceptordom was
cast by the way they figured in TV interviews.

The Swiss Mountain Bat jumped. With the light shifting, he could see the
mystery building in his viewfinder. He steadied the huge telephoto lens and
delightedly snapped away.

The shadows lengthened. All of a sudden a dark shape came hurtling down
from the right of our camp: a great bird, concentrating on its prey, surprised to
find us here. I could see its stunned look, and as it pulled up then banked away

down the slope, the bird—it was a golden eagle—lost a single white feather. The
down feather drifted slowly, like a parachute flare, until it landed in the bushes,
and Mahood scrambled to retrieve it.

That night, back on the plain beneath Mount Stirling, we camped and built a fire
of the pitiful gatherings of twisted driftwood-like pinyon and the odd two-by-four
someone had left—and talked of Lazar’s shady past and proton cannons and
sky quakes. The campfire carved out a cave of light, and lore and jokes flew back
and forth as the mesquite burned longer than the thin, twisted sticks seemed to
have a right to do. This was the closest we got, I figured, to ghost stories or the
primal folktale.

Tom Mahood talked of a guy who claimed to have worked on flying saucer
simulators, of a man who knew the man who did the ejection seat for the
Blackbird and then for the Aurora. “My rational mind says that what you see is
all there is,” he said, “but another part of me wants to believe there’s something
else out there.”

This from an engineer, an exacting thinker and researcher—yet from the
beginning Mahood was drawn to Lazar’s story. For all his just-the-facts-ma’am
attitude, he admitted he had initially felt that Lazar was telling the truth, that he
had been at S-4. Lazar’s very presence seemed to have this convincing effect on
people, his sense of self-possession, almost diffidence. Mahood continued to feel
that way even as more and more information seemed to discredit Lazar’s claims
about his resume and career. But the emotional link remained. For a time, it gave
him restless nights. Like many, Mahood wanted to believe; the wild hopes and
cosmic dreams of his heart struggled with his engineer’s head. As if in a Pascalian
leap into faith, even the most remote of chances that the revelations were true
provided a tempting counterbalance to the weight of facts against them.

The darkness was profound. I lay on my back in the sleeping bag and saw the
Milky Way not as a collection of stars but as a smear. My eye went to Orion, the
first constellation I had learned at the planetarium in second grade. Zeta Reticuli,
putative source of flying saucers, was visible in Cygnus, someone had told me,
but only in the Southern Hemisphere. All at once a single meteorite streaked
through the Little Dipper. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

Driving back to Las Vegas the next morning, I thought about the shadows
around the campfire. They suggested to me Plato’s cave, as updated by the class
cut-up who shapes his fingers into a rabbit or duck by flashing them in the beam
of the film-strip projector. Ordinary realities, kept out of sight, turn into
flickering monsters on the cave wall. Captured foreign fighters become alien
spaceships; nuclear test tunnels turn into a network of secret underground
chambers; radar test shapes on stalks are transformed into saucers hovering
above apertures to the underworld.

A few weeks after the hike, Tom Mahood returned to the top of Mount Stirling.
With a different telescope, by different light, he was sure that the mysterious
building we had seen was nothing more than a rock formation.

14. Black Manta

Dreamland spun me out again, this time to Amarillo, home of the famed Cadillac
Ranch, where old Caddies are buried up to their tail fins, and whose name always
reminds me of “Paradise Ranch.” Tracking the evolution of the tail fin, which was
inspired by the fins on Kelly Johnson’s P-38 and the rocket fins of the late fifties,
I understood it as a monument to a society in which El Dorado is no longer a
mythical gold city but a Cadillac coupe with a vinyl top and gold-anodized
brightwork installed at the dealership.

I came here to meet Steve Douglass. Although he rarely ventured to the
perimeter of Dreamland, he came to be venerated as the ur-Interceptor, a near
legendary figure. He was a military monitor, an interceptor of radio broadcasts,
and if anyone knew what was flying, he did.

Beavis and Butt-head snickered on the TV in the living room of Steve’s ranch-
style home. Then Steve popped a tape into the VCR and the boys disappeared
into a powdery mix of colors. There was a silence, then solid gray-blue; then a
dot emerged, grew larger, became a bat, a ray-shaped airplane swooping
overhead—and finally the image dissolved into gray grit. Steve flicked the set off.
“Seven seconds,” he said. “You live for those moments. You listen all those hours
for that kind of gold nugget.”

Steve felt sure he had captured the TR3A Black Manta on video for the very
first time.

Once a year, something like Brigadoon, the long-closed base at Roswell came
alive with dozens of aircraft, in April or May, on the occasion of the annual
Roving Sands air exercise, which involves hundreds of airplanes and airspace
over five states. For Steve and, later, other Interceptors, Roving Sands was the
Olympics of plane spotting.

Trying to spot something unusual meant spending hours standing in the back
of a pickup truck, listening to scanners and watching the distant horizons. Most
of the planes were familiar ones, but every so often something strange would
appear, usually at dusk. In May 1993, Steve had gone black-plane hunting there
with Elwood Johnston, his father-in-law and fellow stealthy. Steve had always
had good luck finding mysterious flying objects when Elwood was along; he
believed Elwood was a stealth lure.

At the end of the day, Elwood saw it first. “What’s that?” Then they both found
it on the horizon in the dusk. He was sure it was not an F-117; it was slower,
with a different sound, a different shape. Douglass’s radio scanner crackled, the

numbers churned on its readout. As he raised his video camera, the battery
warning light flashed. He grabbed seven seconds of video before the machine
snapped off.

When he got home, Douglass printed an enhanced view of the bat plane. Then,
consulting with his wide network of experts in the industry, the aviation press,
and the military, he tweaked the details to create a speculative image of the
airplane.

It looked like the airplane that the Greenpeace intruders had spotted when
they ventured across the Dreamland perimeter in 1986. It had been speculated on
as far back as 1990 by the mysterious figure who signed himself “J. Jones,” an
insider reporting on stealth. The accepted wisdom among stealth chasers and
Interceptors was that the Black Manta operated in tandem with the F-117A
Stealth fighter, relaying target information, and evidence suggested it had been
used in the Gulf War.

The TR3A would likely have first flown from Groom Lake, and something like
it had been seen often near Dreamland. In 1993, Agent X had been startled to see
a batlike craft sailing right over the highway near Alamo, a little town of two
motels and a diner southeast of the perimeter. Even the radio host Art Bell had
spotted a two-hundred-foot hovering triangle near his home in Pahrump, west of
Dreamland. And what about the two sightings, west and east of the restricted
area, of triangular craft in company with F-117s, in February and November of
1995?

Was the TR3A a descendant of the Theater High Altitude Penetrator (THAP),
an airplane made public by Northrop in the late 1970s? In 1980 both THAP—
which seemed to be Northrop’s consolation prize in the original stealth
competition—and the Lockheed Have Blue programs were classified Special
Access Programs, and very little additional information about them emerged. But
in 1983, defense industry insiders reported that Northrop had gotten a contract
for twenty-five or so aircraft. In November 1987, Steve learned of a crash of a
plane “not an F-117.”

Was it the same craft involved in the September 26, 1994, Boscombe Down
crash in the United Kingdom? Was it the craft that crashed on October 18, 1994,
at Kirtland AFB? Steve picked up the radio traffic from the crash recovery team,
which referred to returning the wreckage of “a high-altitude research aircraft” to
Edwards.

Douglass’s printout of the TR3A looks, at first glance, like a flying saucer.

Steve leads me into his thickly carpeted retreat, where six scanners work steadily,
hopping from channel to channel—shortwave, VHF, UHF, sideband—all feeding
into a little voice-activated Radio Shack tape recorder that vacuums up every
scrap of voice, packing a day’s talk into ninety minutes or so, which Douglass

listens to late at night. He grows restless without a scanner nearby, the bubbling
reassurance of its red digits pumping frequencies through its chips and extruding
slugs of conversation. Talk with him on the phone, and you have to get used to
sudden soft pauses, as if there were a fault in the line, as he cocks his other ear
toward something on one of the radios.

Airplane models hang from the ceiling; pictures of planes line the walls. In one
corner lurks a huge oscilloscope—military surplus—and a Hallicrafter’s
shortwave set, packed with tubes, picked up for twenty-five dollars at a garage
sale. There are maps of military bases and of New Mexico, as well as a Landsat
photo of the F-117 base at Tonopah. Red and blue lines show main air routes and
refueling courses. Amarillo is dead center in the heart of the country’s military
fly ways. “Why go to Groom Lake,” Steve asks, “when the planes seem to come to
you?” Steve has had Stealth fighters fly right over the house.

Steve loads the taped radio clips from the White Sands episode onto Soundscan
files on his Performa 450 computer. Now he clicks on each little folder on the
screen. Maintenance and security people talk about the arrival of a VIP in the
morning. (Later, Douglass learns that Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, had visited El Paso the day before. He suspects Powell might have
made an unpublicized side trip for a glimpse of the Black Manta.) The radio
traffic refers to the plane as an “STF.” Does that stand for Stealth or Survivable
Tactical Fighter? Another report has it as “Tactical Survivable Aircraft” and ties
its lineage to the Northrop THAP of earlier years.

At the history office at Edwards Air Force Base, I find that the TR3A is included
among the aircraft types index, along with the F-15 and the SR-71. But the only
materials in the file are press clips, not the flight test reports and other
documents provided for other aircraft.

On March 23, 1992, Steve picked up radio traffic between two unidentified craft
using the call signs Darkstar November and Darkstar Mike. He realized they were
flying close by. Then the house began to shake, and the window frames rattled.
He ran out of his house, slapping film into his Canon AE-1. He could hear the
rumbling sound of the engine—like a rocket engine, only intermittent—in regular
bursts. He could even feel it in his chest, but all he saw of the craft itself was “a
silver glint of light, a metallic shape.” Even with a 400mm telephoto lens he
managed to capture only the plane’s contrail—a string of roundish puffs, the
now-well-known “doughnut-on-a-rope.”

About a month later, he got a report from one of his Interceptor informants in
the high desert area of California of communications between “Joshua control”
and an aircraft calling itself “Gaspipe.” He and other watchers thought it was the
spoor of a new kind of engine, a secret aircraft’s pulser jet. Within weeks it was
published in Aviation Week.

Later, Steve talked by phone with a pulse-jet engine expert he knows at a

military contractor. The engineer played chords on a synthesizer over the phone,
striking lower and lower frequencies until Douglass found the one he had heard.
“Damn,” the engineer said, recognizing that his rivals had perfected an advanced
jet engine, “they’ve done it.”

Steve Douglass grew up in the West, and one of his earliest memories is of going
up into the mountains to watch in the distance a nuclear explosion in Nevada. He
recalls how beautiful it was, how it lit up the sky like a rosy sunset.

He was a photographer for the newspaper in Amarillo when he bought his first
scanner. It was a simple model for following the police and fire bands, so he
could rush to the scene of a car accident or warehouse conflagration to snap
pictures for the paper. The more he listened, the more he wondered what else
was on the air. “It was like the old George Carlin bit,” he says, “ ‘What’s on
beyond the edge of the dial, after the knob stops?’ What are they hiding out
there?”

What he discovered was the new world of scanners. Around 1970, solid-state
electronics had replaced old crystals as the heart of scanners. Before long, you
could buy a 200-channel scanner from Radio Shack for about three hundred
dollars. Radio Shack has sold more than four million 2006 scanners worldwide,
and in theory anyone who knows how to use one can eavesdrop on most military
traffic, on Air Force One itself. Steve figured there were probably no more than
five hundred hard-core military monitors in this country, which may simply
mean people who have nothing better to do with their time.

Some systems hop from channel to channel to defeat eavesdroppers, but the
best of the new equipment can cover thousands of channels a second and listen in
on the channel-hoppers too. Encryption is used at high-level bases, but it’s
expensive and vulnerable to atmospheric shifts. Even at Groom Lake, the camou
dudes broadcast in the open, most of the time.

Steve bought more powerful scanners and eventually found all sorts of strange
things beyond the end of the dial. He began picking up the military channels, and
as a stringer he fed bits of information to the Associated Press. His first scoop
came in 1986, when he picked up transmissions from a Soviet nuclear sub with a
critical nuclear reactor problem. In an early sign of detente, U.S. Navy ships had
rushed to the scene to help out. The Pentagon denied the story, but when an A.P.
reporter brought in Douglass’s tape, on which a sailor screams, “It’s sinking! It’s
going down! Radiation counters are going up!” the military finally admitted what
was going on. Television cameras were present when American ships rescued the
Soviet crew.

Douglass heard the troops assembling to invade Grenada, then Panama. During
the Gulf War, he fed network reporters shortwave accounts of SCUD launchings
from troops in Saudi Arabia before their Israeli bureaus heard the sirens.

Once, he monitored the radio traffic surrounding the crash of a B-1B bomber.
The airplane had smashed into a mountainside, and the Air Force was blaming
the pilot. Investigators turned up at the pilot’s father’s house, asking if his son
was a homosexual or a drug abuser. Congress was considering further funding for
the B-1B, and the Air Force wanted nothing said that could pin fault on the
airplane. Douglass, after hearing of the crash, checked his scanner tape from the
night before. It clearly recorded the pilot complaining of problems with the
plane’s autopilot. When the news came out, the military brass denied that any
“amateur ham-radio operator” could have such information. The father of the
dead pilot called Steve, and Steve was able to tell him the truth.

Steve and his wife, Teresa, an artist and computer whiz, began to publish a
newsletter for military monitors called Intercepts. It was the first publication that
tied together the far-flung watchers, who were conscious of being, well, outside
of the mainstream, and it gave them a sense of the others out there. In the pages
of Intercepts Douglass ran letters and columns above the code names of
correspondents: Darkstar November, Big Red, Lone Star, Ghostrider. Douglass
soon had subscribers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and throughout
the military.

He established his own dial-up bulletin board, which bubbled away on an old
Commodore 128 in his Bat Cave, and then began operating a forum on America
Online called Above Top Secret, later Project Black. His book, The Comprehensive
Guide to Military Monitoring, would become the bible of the subject in which he
shares tricks, frequencies, and some of the wonderful American music of call
signs and radio vocabulary.

On the Net, Steve saw that many stealth chasers were meeting each other for
the first time. On-line had become a clearinghouse for monitors to share military
intelligence—“a public intelligence network,” he termed it. Before “It’s true, I
saw it on the Internet” became a joke, Steve saw clues and rumors blossom on¬
line.

One day, men in suits began to appear in the windows of the long-vacant house
behind Steve and Teresa’s place, and a bug showed up on his phone. The cellular
phone of the local congressman had been tapped and recorded, and Douglass was
suspected. The real culprit was later found, but Douglass now sweeps for bugs
monthly.

Military monitoring has been called “ham radio cubed” or “super ham,” and the
scoops monitors provide are often described disdainfully as “ham radio reports,”
Steve told me. But monitoring is a whole different culture from that of ham radio
operators. “Hams look down on monitors,” he said. “Hams say, ‘You can only
listen?’ ” The monitoring culture is actually more closely related to the nation’s
brief infatuation in the mid-seventies with CB radio. Motorists listened to CB to
find out what the police were doing; many then graduated to police scanners,

which let them listen in on the police directly. Steve, too, played around with CB
until “the idiots all got on.”

Steve established good contacts in the military and defense industries, and he
was constantly hanging around bases and watching exercises. Once he chatted
with a Stealth fighter pilot at an air show. “How does flying the F-117 compare
to the TR3A?” Steve asked him.

“Well, you see ...” the pilot began. “Huh? Well, I can’t talk about that.”

In 1995, Steve spotted what he thought was another new aircraft near Cannon
Air Force Base. He called it “artichoke,” for the pointed, overlapping shapes of its
trailing edge. It was light gray and about the size of an F-lll. He noticed that the
military had opened a new Military Operating Area—a MOA—not far from where
he had spotted the so-called artichoke. Another year, Steve spotted lights
hovering above the runway at the White Sands base, then zipping off—the classic
flying saucer flight pattern. But from the radio traffic, he speculated that this
might be another secret craft—a Harrier-like vertical-takeoff-and-landing fighter.

Steve noted other sightings, some of them halfway around the world. In
September 1994, reports surfaced in the United Kingdom of a mysterious aircraft
crash-landing at Boscombe Down, the U.K.’s own version of Dreamland. The
British had been testing at least one craft in Dreamland, the evidence suggested,
but this was likely an American plane.

The front landing gear, it seemed, had failed, and observers spotted the strange
shape, with inward-canting tail fins, partly covered by a tarpaulin. According to
one theory it was a spin-off of Northrop’s YF-23, which competed unsuccessfully
with Lockheed-Boeing’s YF-22 to replace the F-15. Some believed it was called
ASTRA, for Advanced Stealth Technology Reconnaissance Aircraft, built by
Northrop and McDonnell Douglas. Some believed the charcoal gray airplane was
the A-17, a replacement for the F-lll. Radio intercepts referred to it as AV-6 (Air
Vehicle Six, its construction number), with USAF serial number 90-2414 and the
call sign Blackbuck 11.

The C-5 that came to retrieve it was referred to by the call sign “Lance 18,”
with the intended destination code of KPMD—air controller designation for the
airport at Palmdale, California, home of Northrop and Lockheed. Within days,
there was another accident involving a similar plane in New Mexico. To Steve
that suggested some structural problem: Had the same part failed after the same
length of time and stress?

In the spring of 1994, I headed out one evening at dusk to watch the Roving
Sands exercises in Roswell. Across from the base, in front of a neat little house, a
tiny Hispanic woman was tenderly washing her husband’s highway patrol car.
The landscape on one side of the road was the stuff of sport-utility ads or
Technicolor Westerns, with barbed-wire cattle fences and a decaying windmill for

punctuation. On the other side, it was action thriller: chain-link fence topped
with accordion wire.

While Steve kept his video camera focused upward, I found my eyes wandering
to the ground. Even when passing directly overhead, fighters did not seem to be
moving at astonishing speed until you stood back and watched the first
appearance of their shadows, then the black wave racing toward you across dry
grass.

At night, it is harder to see. There is a certain phenomenology with regard to
night visions, the green, teeming imagery familiar from crime and war footage,
but to the unaided eye, the lights of the most mundane craft could grow surreal.
Far off in the Hollywood Western sky, a Navy fighter returning to base was just a
grain of red. But then it defined itself, stronger, like a laser, before innocently
resolving into two wing-tip lights as it came in to land.

Standing on the fence line, waiting for flying objects we could identity, Steve
and I had time to contemplate the appearances of UFOs. “Why don’t they come as
clouds,” I asked, “so they blend in?”

“Why don’t they come disguised as Golden Arches,” Steve replied, “so they can
land wherever they want and not be noticed?”

“What if they’re unofficial, not authorized? We always assume they’re here
doing research, but what if they’re not part of some E.T. NASA, but just teenagers
out cruising?”

“Joyriders,” Steve said. “Heck, low riders.”

Sometimes, Steve told me, he used his scanners to pick up tornado sightings
and went off chasing them. “You know,” he said, “trailer parks cause tornadoes.
It’s a scientific fact.”

“And maybe deserts cause UFOs? How come they never land in the parking
lots of New Jersey malls?”

Or was it military bases and secret research facilities that spawned saucers?
Were they there, as in the famed reports of snooping UFOs at Malmstrom and
Kirtland Air Force bases, to spy on us? Or was it the presence of all that strange
and frightening weaponry that put people in a frame of mind to see discs and
lights?

Glenn Campbell came down for one edition of Roving Sands, and Steve was
stunned to hear the security forces speak of him on the radio. “PsychoSpy is
here,” they said. Campbell thought it was a joke at first, but it startled and
perhaps frightened him. That year, too, a SEAL unit was assigned to patrol the
Roswell base perimeter. Steve and the others watched a helicopter drop off
several shadowy figures. The strange thing wasn’t that they were black, but that
they were silent. Steve could hear cars on the road a couple of miles away, but no

sound from the helicopter engines.

The SEALs crept up on the Interceptors, but they were clearly visible on the
Interceptors’ night-vision scopes and clearly audible on the scanners. Every time
the SEALs moved up a little bit, the Interceptors lit them with a laser. It was
Radio Shack versus the Pentagon, and it was no contest.

Finally, the SEALs got disgusted and radioed for a humvee to pick them up.
One of the Interceptors had an idea and got on a cell phone. A few minutes later,
a Domino’s delivery vehicle pulled up to the humvee parked back on the
perimeter and delivered two large ones, pepperoni and cheese. The anchovies
were the final insult.

Just as Bob Lazar’s story held a fascination that grew even as it seemed less and
less likely to be true, the Roswell story was drawing more attention the further it
receded into the past. When Steve and I visited the town, it was on the verge of a
new saucer boom.

A mayor was elected who decided to make lemonade from what respectable
townspeople had hitherto viewed as a lemon. He put a saucer on his official
stationery, and promoted the town as a saucer tourist site. “Why don’t you drop
in?” the brochures read. “After all, THEY might have.”

James Moseley, the acerbic publisher of Saucer Smear, commented in 1996 that
“the Roswell incident has emerged as a myth of such power and allure that it is
no longer in anybody’s best interest to seek—or admit—the truth.”

What made the Roswell story special was that it marked the only time the U.S.
government ever officially claimed to have captured a flying saucer. The press
release from Roswell Army Air Field came on July 8, 1947:

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when
the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force,
Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc
through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of
Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last
week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the wreckage ...

“Fortunate,” “cooperation”—the studied casualness of the vocabulary made the
acquisition sound like a bequest to a museum.

The man who issued the press release—on orders from his boss, Gen. William
“Butch” Blanchard, head of the 509th Bomb Group—was public information
officer Lt. Walter Haut. Haut, interviewed years later, declared he had never seen
the wreckage, or visited the crash site. At first, he didn’t really think it was a
flying saucer, but by the 1980s he did.

The 509th was the special unit that had dropped the first atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and, the year before, had bombed Eniwetok. In

1947, it was the only unit in the world capable of dropping atomic weapons,
although there were still precious few of them in the U.S. arsenal. Blanchard was
a top bombardier who had trained in the secret range near Wendover, Utah. Had
his bomb scores been a few points higher, he might have pushed the button
himself over Hiroshima.

Haut would attribute Blanchard’s apparent eagerness to issue the press release
to his long-standing interest in good community relations. Butch Blanchard
carefully doled out news from the base evenhandedly between the two
newspapers and two radio stations of Roswell. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily
Record, the local afternoon paper, ran the following story:

RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION

No Details of Flying Disk Are Revealed Roswell Hardware Man and

Wife Report Disk Seen

The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Field
announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying
saucer. According to information released by the department, over authority of
Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the
Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox,
here, that he had found the instrument on his premises. Major Marcel and a
detail from the base went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated.
After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to
higher headquarters.

The headlines did not last long. The wreckage was flown to the headquarters of
the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, where the commanding general, Roger
Ramey, declared the “instrument” to be a weather balloon. Only afternoon papers
and one round of the eastern morning papers carried the story before the press
release was “withdrawn.”

Haut was dispatched to retrieve copies of the release from the local newspapers
and radio stations, although he denied later reports that he had been ordered to
do so directly by the Pentagon. And neither his career nor Blanchard’s seem to
have suffered for their embarrassing haste.

The New York Times treated the story on its front page on Wednesday July 9,
1947: ‘disc’ near bomb test site is just a weather balloon— emphasizing the proximity of
Alamogordo, a hundred miles away, ‘flying saucer’ tales pour in from round the world.

Walter Haut’s named was mangled as “Warren Haught,” and the story made
Irving Newton, the weather man in Ramey’s office, the hero for identifying the
wreckage as a weather balloon. But there was enough publicity to keep the
phones in Roswell ringing for a week or so.

A crestfallen Daily Record the next day reported, ramey empties roswell saucer, and

harassed rancher who located “saucer” sorry he told about it. After the affair had faded, the
newspaper ran an editorial that implicitly set the whole thing in the context of
the wider saucer obsession and the nation’s mood with regard to atomic weapons
and international tensions. The end of the war was supposed to allow Americans
to come home. Instead, the beginning of the Cold War had drawn the country
into world issues seemingly without resolution. Victory was no longer a goal.

By the early eighties, Roswell had resurfaced. Now it was not just a sighting, it
had a plot—a story. Or it was a plot—a cover-up. There had been hundreds of
flying saucer sightings in the summer of 1947, but Roswell had the elements of a
great one. The tale was appealingly simple and dramatic: A couple of days after a
violent thunderstorm, during which he hears another sort of boom amid the
thunder, an old sheep rancher comes across mysterious wreckage in one of his
fields—metal that won’t dent, parchment that won’t tear, something like balsa
wood that won’t break, and mysterious writing. He has no phone. He finally
makes it to the feed-and-seed town of Roswell and tells the sheriff, who sends
him to the Army Air Field base. Two men come to investigate: an intelligence
officer and a counterintelligence man. They spend the night in a shack, dining on
cold beans and crackers, then rise at dawn to recover the wreckage. There is too
much to fit in their old Buick and Jeep carry-all. Soon, troops appear and the
area is cordoned off for full recovery. The rancher goes incommunicado for
several days, then returns home taciturn but with a new pickup truck. The Air
Force ships plane and bodies to Wright Field in Dayton for analysis, issues a press
release, and then withdraws it. The FBI stops a wire-service transmission in
midsentence, and other government agents intimidate witnesses until all
publicity vanishes.

The scenario was perfect: the mysterious shiny object in the desert, the grizzled
and baffled rancher, the swift deployment of the military, the hush-hush ferrying
of mysterious wreckage to secret labs, the cover-up. The wreckage bore
mysterious symbols or signs or letters—hieroglyphic, they were called, “like
Japanese or Chinese.” It was made for the movies.

Roswell also offered a wonderful cast of characters, from Jesse Marcel to Mac
Brazel; the stock sheriff, George Wilcox; and, among the witnesses who would
surface later, Pappy Henderson, the old pilot who gave testimony to his friend
the dentist. There was Sheridan Cavitt, the closemouthed CIC agent, and the
nurse who attended the autopsies and then vanished—there were rumors of a
fatal plane crash, rumors she was in a convent on the outskirts of Roswell. And
don’t forget the teletype operator named Lydia Sleppy, who described the FBI
interrupting her dispatch of the press release.

The world of ufology is as racked by jealousy and inbreeding as any academic
discipline ever dreamed of being. It has its fads and fashions, its hot areas and its
backwaters. UFO researchers, like professors of English Romantic poetry or

biochemistry, have to find the right topics if they are to flourish on the lecture
tour and in the publishing world.

The specialty called “crash recovery” was, in the seventies, a highly
unfashionable and suspect realm of the rivalrous and quarrelsome world of the
youfers. It had lain in the shadows since the early fifties, when Frank Scully,
author of Behind the Flying Saucers, had been duped by a couple of con men into
believing he was in possession of flying saucer wreckage, which turned out to be
profoundly terrestrial pot-and-pan-grade aluminum.

By the late seventies, a UFO researcher named Len Stringfield had found his
own niche of credibility, gathering hard evidence about crashes and lining up
witnesses. Soon he was a prominent figure on the UFO lecture circuit. He was the
first to focus again on Roswell and the recovered wreckage.

Sensing Stringfield was on to a good thing, William Moore and Charles Berlitz,
whose previous success had been a book about the Bermuda Triangle, joined with
UFO researcher Stanton Friedman in 1980 to publish The Roswell Incident, which
brought the story back to the forefront. Books by other investigators followed,
each adding witnesses and in some cases new, secondary crash sites. In 1989 the
Showtime cable network broadcast a film on the case. Roswell came to be the
touchstone of the cover-up theory.

The key new witness to emerge was intelligence officer Jesse Marcel, who
before his death in 1992 told Friedman of going out to the crash site, near
Corona, about fifty miles north of Roswell, with CIC agent Cavitt and collecting
pieces of wreckage.

Marcel would later be photographed in the Fort Worth office of General Ramey
with parts of the wreckage laid across the office chairs. Ramey had declared the
wreckage to be that of a weather balloon—but Marcel knew it was “not of this
world.”

A key element of the new version of the story was a second crash site, near St.
Augustin, New Mexico. Did General Blanchard use his “leave,” beginning July 8,
to visit this second crash site? Why did Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining
cancel an important trip to the West Coast on July 8? In 1992, Gen. Thomas
DuBose (in 1947 a colonel and Ramey’s chief of staff) testified shortly before his
death that he had received a telephone call from Gen. Clements McMullen at
Andrews Army Air Field in Washington, D.C., instructing Ramey to concoct a
“cover story” to “get the press off our backs.” In 1990, retired general Arthur E.
Exon, who had been stationed at Wright Patterson, described the testing there of
the Roswell crash debris. The tests included “everything from chemical analysis,
stress tests, compression tests, flexing. It was brought into our material
evaluation labs. [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed ... there were
other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn’t be dented
with heavy hammers ... the overall consensus was that the pieces were from

space.”

In 1994, after prodding by New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff, the General
Accounting Office was assigned the task of ferreting out the truth about Roswell.

But on September 8, 1994, before the report could be completed, the Air Force
issued its first official statement on Roswell in forty-seven years—a twenty-three-
page report stating that the “most likely” source of the Roswell debris was a
balloon from a secret program known as Project Mogul. The purpose of Project
Mogul was to detect Soviet nuclear tests by using sensitive instruments carried
aloft by high-altitude balloons.

In July 1995, the General Accounting Office released a report based on its
search for any government documents about the Roswell crash. It forthrightly
declared, “In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned
that some government records covering RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) activities
had been destroyed and others had not.” Exactly which had been destroyed and
why was not made clear.

The youfers found it suspicious that not only was there no mention at the time
of the incident in the Roswell base newspaper The Atomic Blast, but that the
official Air Force investigation into UFO sightings, Project Blue Book, did not
mention it either. To them the very absence of information meant the presence of
something important.

In the Roswell revival, the old mysteries of “Hangar 18” at Wright-Pat, where
the debris had supposedly been taken, expanded into a larger, much vaguer
pattern. The newest scenarios had B-29s, B-25s, and C-54s dispersing bodies and
wreckage in all directions. The element of the story that would tie Roswell to
Dreamland was what I thought of as “the Dispersal.” In the initial story, the Air
Force said that the wreckage had been taken to Fort Worth, then sent on to
Wright-Pat. With retelling and new witnesses, and especially with the addition of
bodies, the tale of Wright Patterson Air Force Base evolved into one about that
base’s Hangar 18, a ghostly facility where many saucers and bodies would be
stored. Other delivery sites were added: Los Alamos, Sandia, Edwards, McDill or
Eglin Air Force bases in Florida, even Indian Springs—and Area 51. In time, Area
51 would become the equivalent of Hangar 18, writ large.

Among the new Roswell witnesses who seemed to show up every few months was
a man named Frank Kaufman, who had worked at the base in 1947. Appearing in
yet another television documentary about the crash, he was a hard-faced man
who described having taken part in the recovery of a saucer that was about
twenty-five feet long. It had split open in the crash, and alien bodies were
recovered. Kaufman had even submitted an official report, he said, with a
drawing of the craft. When I caught sight of it, I jumped: It looked a little like a
flying saucer, but it looked even more like Steve’s Black Manta.

The plastic model of the saucer released by Testor in time for the fiftieth
anniversary of the incident was based on drawings “forensically composited,” in
the company’s phrase, from interviews with Kaufman and others conducted by
one William Louis McDonald, who had been brought in by John Andrews.
Kaufman described the craft as “Stealth-bomber-like”—an example, the Air Force
would have said, of the seepage of subsequent impressions into earlier memories
that figured in Air Force rebuttals of Roswell witnesses.

With an elongated, raylike body whose edges curled up to form fins or tail, the
model craft suggested a crossbreed between saucer and secret airplane, a bastard
offspring of the two watcher cultures.

As the Roswell myth grew—and while two academic anthropologists, Benson
Saler and Charles Ziegler, analyzed its different versions with the thoroughness of
a Levi-Strauss or Franz Boas—the dispersal of the wreckage traced a direct line in
the Lore from Roswell to Dreamland, a line that began as a faint thread of rumor
in the eighties and grew to the bold stroke of legend in the nineties.

15. “Redlight” and “MJ”

The road from Roswell to Dreamland was long and circuitous, paved with much
speculation and mysterious code names. The name “Redlight,” stenciled on
shipping crates, marked the first important public connection of Area 51 to flying
saucers.

In April 1980 a witness named “Mike,” who claimed to be a former employee
at Groom Lake, told a representative of MUFON, one of the larger and most
influential UFO organizations, that he had caught a glimpse of the crates when he
worked at the base between 1961 and 1963. Later, he saw a flying saucer and
learned that Project Redlight was the name of a secret program for testing the
saucers that had continued until 1962. Mike’s story was in part corroborated by
radar operators at Tonopah, who around the same time had reported seeing very
fast blips on their screens.

The A-12—the original Blackbird, the CIA’s version of the airplane—had first
flown in 1962. Had Mike only reported the inevitable result of secrecy, the
scuttlebutt that grew out of compartmentalized information, the speculations
inspired by a few astoundingly real details of a very fast aircraft?

The first time the American public at large ever heard the word “Dreamland”
was on the evening of October 14, 1988, when it was uttered on the Fox
network’s television program UFO Cover-up? Live! Two “inside informants” were
presented in disguise, code-named Falcon and Condor. Condor described Project
Aquarius, an effort to make contact with extraterrestrials, and Snowbird, another
program begun in 1972 and still being carried out in Nevada at “an area called
Area 51, or Dreamland.” “The extraterrestrials,” Condor said, “have complete
control of this base,” the result of an agreement between the government and the
aliens that had gone awry. And in what became the most memorable and derided
phrase of the show, Condor went on to describe the aliens here on earth, saying,
“they enjoy music ... especially ancient Tibetan-style music ... the favorite dish
or snack is ice cream—especially strawberry.”

Condor, many in the UFO world concluded, was actually a man named Richard
Doty, a special agent at the Kirtland AFB unit of the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations (AFOSI). In September 1980, Doty had written a report concerning
a series of unidentified lights seen over the Kirtland range, near Albuquerque and
the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility.

He was aware of a man named Paul Bennewitz, who believed that aliens were
not only actively flying over the range but had implanted human abductees with
control devices. Bennewitz claimed to have electronically picked up the signals

that activated these devices and to be in communication with aliens inside their
craft. Doty was said to have provided him with disinformation, encouraging his
speculations, including a memo analyzing Bennewitz’s sightings, which seemed to
lend them credence—and prove that AFOSI was watching the saucer watchers as
well.

Bennewitz, a mild-mannered Albuquerque businessman, would end up chain¬
smoking and sleepless, with knives and guns stashed around his house, fearing
spies and intruders. Finally, he had to be hospitalized for exhaustion.

One piece of disinformation shown to Bennewitz was a faked memo ostensibly
sent by teletype from Wright-Pat to Kirtland AFB.

William Moore, coauthor of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, which began
the revival of interest in the case, also claimed that Doty gave him secret
information on UFOs in February 1981. Moore claimed to have received a
briefing paper on “Project Aquarius,” an effort to make contact with aliens,
which was later mentioned on the television show. The paper mentioned other
projects, including the one called Snowbird, which since 1972 had been testing a
flying saucer “somewhere in Nevada,” and it also referred to access restricted to
“MJ-12.” Thus an infamous code name was first introduced to the world.

In January 1982, Moore met Robert Pratt, a former National Enquirer reporter,
and told him about Doty, his “Deep Throat” source. The two wrote a novelized
version of the story, called The Aquarius Document, which was never published.

In 1984, TV producer Linda Moulton Howe, known for her documentaries on
the cattle mutilations, claimed Doty had provided her with a look at “presidential
briefing papers” about flying saucers. One paper described a meeting between
earthlings and aliens who had landed at Holloman AFB, near Alamogordo, New
Mexico, at six am. on April 25, 1964. There was a similar meeting at Edwards—
reminiscent of Ike’s trip there. Howe claims that Doty told her there were people
who wanted the information to get out: It was time. He promised her that film
footage of the meeting and other dramatic evidence of contact would be
forthcoming. Actual images of aliens talking with earthlings! But the additional
material never arrived; Doty told Howe that there were political problems, a
change of heart.

Moore said that Doty provided him with more information from a whole aviary
of bird code-named informants, and in return Moore promised to report back to
Doty on the activities of UFO researchers. Moore, in turn, was collaborating on
research with Stanton Friedman, the UFO researcher who had once worked for
Aerojet and had a master’s degree in nuclear physics. Moore also began to deal
with Jaime Shandera, a film producer.

On December 11, 1984, shortly before he left his home in Burbank, California,
for a lunch with Moore, Shandera was thumbing through Variety when he heard a
rustling and then a thump as something dropped through the mail slot in his

front door. It was a package wrapped in brown paper and postmarked
Albuquerque, where Doty was stationed at Kirtland AFB. Inside was a roll of
undeveloped black-and-white 35mm film. Moore and Shandera developed the
film, and as the prints were drying they read the words “TOP
SECRET/MAJIC/EYES ONLY” in the orange safety light of the darkroom.

It was the beginning of the Majic 12, Majestic 12, or MJ-12 story. The group
had supposedly been formed by President Truman in September 1947 to
investigate UFOs. Among the photographs was one of a document dated
November 18, 1952—a briefing paper for President-elect Eisenhower stating that
the remains of four alien bodies had been recovered two miles from the Roswell
wreckage site.

The members of the MJ panel were a predictable but convincing group of high-
level government and military officials and top scientists. If fictional, the list had
been cleverly confected. It included Lloyd Berkner, a member of the CIA’s
Robertson panel looking into UFOs; James Forrestal, first secretary of defense in
July 1947 and, famously, a suicide at Bethesda Hospital in May 1949; Gordon
Gray, assistant secretary of the army, who later became head of the 5412
committee, Ike’s inner circle for national security decisions; CIA director Walter
Bedell Smith, who had discussed the psychological warfare implications of UFOs;
MIT professor Jerome Hunsaker, the head of NACA, the predecessor of NASA;
and Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Air Materiel Command at
Wright Patterson Air Field, on record as believing that “the phenomenon is
something real.”

The group’s alleged head—called “MJ-1”—was Vannevar Bush himself, who
during World War II was head of the National Defense Research Council, in
charge of the Manhattan Project, the Radiation Lab at MIT, and other important
secret research programs

The MJ-12 documents were the biggest thing to hit the UFO world in years.
Moore, Shandera, and Friedman did not make them public until 1985 because,
they said later, they wanted first to verify their authenticity. But critics, led by
longtime UFO debunker and Aviation Week editor Phil Klass, immediately
attacked the documents.

All of a sudden the UFO world sounded as if it had turned into a covey of
graphologists. The critique of the documents leveled the following charges: that
the rubber stamp of the top secret banner was not made for the purpose but had
changeable type (like old-style library due-date stamps) that bore a strong
resemblance to one Bill Moore had used for his own return address; the
presidential directive order number establishing the group was not consistent
with the numbering system (secret directives, Friedman countered, would
naturally not be numbered with the standard system); the documents bore no
top-secret register number, and the classification “Top Secret Restricted

Information” was not used until years later; the supposedly top-secret documents
did not have the “Page _ of _ pages” indication that is standard; the document
uses the form “Roswell Army Base,” which was not used after 1943; the text
includes the term “media,” and uses “impacted” as a verb, years before such
locutions became common; and, finally, the Truman signature on the September
24, 1947, memo seems to be identical to one on an October 1, 1947, letter to
Vannevar Bush, right down to the distinctive skid mark on the H in “Harry.”

A dizzying series of debunkings and counterdebunkings began, turning on
watermarks and date formats, bureaucratic procedure and national security
directive numerical formats. But the debates that burned up the newsgroups and
UFO seminars seemed to lodge mostly on the dating matter: Phil Klass had
charged that the MJ-12 documents’ use of a zero before a single digit day of the
month (as 01 August or 06 December) reflected a style that had come along only
after the advent of computers. It was, he wryly added, also a format Moore had
used since the fall of 1983 in his personal papers, as well as in “retyped” official
documents he’d distributed. In response, Friedman pointed out several cases
where the zero had been used, especially in military documents. The charge and
countercharge, assertion and rebuttal, seemed to zoom in on that zero, circling
the null, like a bug in a draining sink. It was more closely scrutinized than any
circle or disc in the sky had ever been.

Moore revealed that in March 1985 he had received several anonymous
postcards. They had been sent to his post office box in Dewey, Arizona, a
previous address, then forwarded to his new home in Los Angeles. One card
showed a photo, credited to the Ethiopian Tourist Commission, which pictured
the African bush. The return address read, “Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” but
the card had been postmarked in New Zealand. On the back, a single-spaced,
typed message read in part: “To win the war ... Add zest to your trip to
Washington / Try Reese’s pieces; / For a stylish look / Try Suit Land.”

For Moore and Shandera, “Reese’s pieces” was a reference to the candy eaten
by the alien in the film E. T. But they reminded Friedman of something else.

To validate the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents, Friedman had planned to
visit the National Archives, where some promising military intelligence records
had been declassified. The trio was particularly interested in Record Group 341.
Friedman was scheduled for a lecture tour and asked Moore to go to Washington
in his stead to check out the documents. Moore was not excited by the idea and
told Friedman about the baffling postcards he’d just received. Then Friedman
happened to mention that the records were not at the Archives themselves but in
a branch in suburban Suitland, Maryland, and in the charge of a man named
Edward Reese.

Moore and Friedman would discover a letter in the declassified records signed
by Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, referring to a change in

the time of an “MJ-12 meeting.” Later, they realized that the box in which the
memo had been found, number 189, was the same number as the post office box
on the return address on the postcard.

Who had sent the cards? And if the letter had been planted in the archives,
who had done so? Was it some kind of Deep Throat seeking to let the secret out,
or a disinformer working from inside?

Robert Cutler’s letter, found loose between two manila files, was dated July 15,
1954, and referred to “NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project.” It was a carbon copy
on onionskin paper bearing the red slash officially declassifying it. The letter
notified Nathan Twining that “the President has decided that the MJ-12 SSP
briefing should take place during the already scheduled White House meeting of
July 16, rather than following it as previously intended.” Friedman and Moore
believed this innocuous, procedural note was the smoking gun that verified the
existence of the MJ-12 group and the authenticity of the earlier MJ-12
documents, but critics attacked what quickly became known as “the Cutler-
Twining memo.” They noted that it did not bear the standard government eagle
watermark, that Ike had no such meeting on July 16, 1954, and that Cutler was
not even in the country on the day he was supposed to have signed the letter.
(His aide James Lay signed a genuine memo on the same date.) Yet Richard
Bissell, who had looked at top-secret documents throughout his career, concluded
that he could find nothing obviously false about the letter.

The MJ-12 tales grew and acquired a backward history: Their origins were better
known than their subsequent existence. In the accounts of people like
conspiracist William Cooper, MJ-12 became linked to the Bilderberger clique and
the Trilateral Commission (whose triangular symbol was said to have been
derived from the markings found on a crashed flying saucer). In these accounts,
MJ-12 killed JFK and forced Nixon from power because he wouldn’t cooperate.

After the Lazar stories surfaced, an investigator named Robert Collins
published an elaborate organizational chart for the MJ-12 organization,
ostensibly dating from 1984-85, which included a prominent branch for
operations at Area 51 and S-4. His source, he said, was William Moore. John Lear
told in his lectures of a country club where the MJ-12 members held their
meetings, playing golf and tennis in between considering the fate of the planet.
According to these accounts, Henry Kissinger and Harold Brown had become
members, along with Lew Allen of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Bobby Ray
Inman, former deputy chief of the CIA and NSA boss.

To UFO and secret aircraft historian Curtis Peebles, the whole thing was very
much in the classic American line of suspicious secret groups and “cabals.”
Twelve was a neat number; Peebles noted that one member, Harvard observatory
director Donald Menzel, was a widely read UFO debunker and could figure as a
Judas. He also referred to the twelve Jewish elders to whom the notoriously

fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been attributed. (Five of the original
MJ-12 panel had “Jewish-sounding names.”) George Van Tassel had been advised
at Giant Rock by a “Council of Twelve” key followers.

The idea of a secret, conspiratorial organization charged with recovering and
repairing saucers while hiding the existence of the UFOs had deep roots.
Ufologist James Moseley wrote in Saucer News in 1956 of reverse-engineered
saucers. “This type of saucer is not built by the American Government as we
ordinarily understand the word ‘Government.’ As fantastic as this might
sound ... these saucers are actually built, operated and maintained by an
organization which is entirely separate from the military and political branches
of the Government that we know about. I shall call this secret project ‘The
Organization.’ ” Donald Keyhoe moved from suspicion of the Air Force in his first
book to charges of outright conspiracy and cover-up in his next, The Flying Saucer
Conspiracy.

But the MJ-12 project also sounded a lot like actual commissions formed to
deal with vital questions of national security, such as the Killian Committee,
which had recommended building the U-2, and the Gaither Commission, formed
around the time of Sputnik. And Majic suggested the “Magic” code name of U.S.
intercepts of Japanese codes. In fact, Larry Bland, editor of the George C.
Marshall Papers, asserted that one of the Majestic-12 documents reproduced
language from a 1944 letter Marshall had sent to presidential candidate Thomas
Dewey regarding the “Magic” intercepts, with the dates and names altered and
“Magic” changed to “Majic.”

If they were fake, the MJ papers were well done. Were they too good to be
true? Or was someone “inside” working to get the word out? Wasn’t there too
much in these documents? Reading them, one sometimes gets the sense that
they’re like a subplot in a badly written film trying to fill in background for the
audience. It was also hard to imagine the social dynamic in the room when
Eisenhower was told of all this, the Pentagon updating the president-elect on a
day when he was scheduled for less than an hour of briefings—just forty-three
minutes, one researcher concluded from a study of Ike’s date book, for the entire
world situation. Was he informed somewhere in those forty-three minutes that,
by the way, we have found flying saucers from another system and have four
alien bodies and a clandestine committee shrouded in secrecy deeper than that of
the Manhattan Project?

Early in 1985, Richard Doty was transferred from Kirtland to West Germany. It
was later charged that he had faked contact reports there and flunked a lie-
detector test, both of which Doty denied. Then, in May 1988, he denied that he
had shown Linda Howe any presidential briefing paper on Aquarius or anything
else, or that he had even heard of MJ-12.

In 1989, speaking at the national MUFON convention, Moore confessed that he
had been a double agent, spreading disinformation on behalf of AFOSI and spying

on UFO believers in order to get closer to the truth and get behind the cover-up.
Desperate not to be left out of the biggest story in history, he had collaborated.

Before long, Moore vanished from the UFO scene. Had he been telling the
truth? Was this an AFOSI job? Was Moore really spreading disinformation? Or
were his claims to have traded duplicity against his fellow youfers for access to
hidden information themselves bogus? Was he a double agent or a triple one?
Did he simply disinform Bennewitz, or did he, by himself or in collusion with
Doty, fake the MJ-12 documents? Finally—given that his story seemed to reflect
those of Moore and Doty—was Lazar’s story a continuation of the same scheme,
by way of Lear (who had “gotten interested” in UFOs in 1986 and cited the same
April 25, 1964, date for the “meeting with aliens” at Holloman)?

To some of the youfers it hardly mattered whether the MJ-12 documents were
real or phony. A number of apologists for the papers worked them into the
trickle-out theory—they might not be genuine but they were preparation, a
means of breaking the news gradually. Without being rank disinformation, they
could still be part of the Big Plan from those On the Inside, preparing us with a
softer version of the truth.

Linda Howe continued to stick to her story of seeing the briefing papers, but
the record was not in her favor.

Was Doty the center of the disinformation scheme that involved Moore,
perhaps John Lear, and eventually Lazar? Was he a loose cannon or a nut? Were
the doubts about Doty’s veracity a further muddying of the waters by the AFOSI
or a recognition that he had gotten out of hand? Doty left the service and was
hired as an investigator in the New Mexico Department of Public Safety. “I don’t
do interviews,” he told me. “I can’t talk about it. I’m still sworn to secrecy.”

He didn’t sound like a nut; he didn’t sound like a hard-ass military type, either.
He had a cowboy sort of twang and sounded quite likable. “I wouldn’t ask you to
violate your oath,” I said.

I suggested that he might not have been treated fairly by the record of the
whole matter.

“I don’t worry about it. People can think what they want to think. The truth is
known by those that matter.”

“Did you distribute any false documents?” I asked.

He repeated that he could not talk about it.

“You feel you acted according to your duty?”

“Absolutely.”

He suggested he might be able to call me back. I was amazed when he did.
“We did not fabricate any of the papers,” he declared. “I have been investigated
and cleared.”

Howe had brought the alleged briefing paper with her, Doty said. I didn’t have
to take his word for it. The meeting with Howe, he revealed, had been
videotaped; the footage backed him up.

He denied having created any briefing paper, or having delivered it. He did not
create the MJ-12 papers, he said, nor did he know who did. AFOSI thought that
the culprit was most likely some private citizen. The implication was Moore
and/or Shandera. Moore, he told me, was “a low-level source” for AFOSI. The FBI
and AFOSI tried to determine the authenticity of the MJ papers but could not;
they ran up against classification barriers. “A lot of time and money was spent
trying to determine whether they were genuine,” Doty said. “The FBI came up
with fifty-fifty.” He also denied being Falcon or Condor. Falcon was another man,
he said, in his eighties if still alive.

I ventured some ideas: In the past, black programs had always been covered
with stories. The U-2 cover was the weather-plane story. The Stealth fighter was
covered in part by the phony A-7s with bogus electronic pods. Had AFOSI ever
run deception programs using UFOs as a cover or diversionary story?

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right on the money. I’ve never worked on any, but there
have been some. It’s called ‘legitimate lying.’ ”

Then I learned that Doty had been born in Roswell; his father had worked on
the U-2 program.

16. The Real Men in Black?

Could Doty be believed? My instincts said so, but I could hear the doubtful
saying, Well, what else would you expect from a disinformation agent?

Yet who was to say that the whole MJ project had not been some larger
version of the sort of cover stories used to hide black programs like that of the F-
117? What Doty had said gave me a new model: Dreamland not just as a
reflecting funhouse mirror but as a malignly refracting crystal. To use the
language of the low-observables engineers, this was not just passive stealth,
bouncing inquiries off at oblique angles, but active stealth, generating false
signals, “spoofing.” For most of the Interceptors, the assumption has been that
the military does not need to generate disinformation, that, as John Andrews
once put it, the “natural mutations” of information would do the trick: The noise
itself would be taken for signal.

But once you opened your mind to the possibility of active disinformation, all
kinds of questions came up. Who, some UFO buffs could ask, would most likely
have the resources to fake the celebrated Santilli film of the “alien autopsy”
claimed to date from the Roswell crash? If such official duplicity was common,
what, then, could be trusted? For years, youfers had been charging the
government with a cover-up, but now, ironically, the opposite had to be
considered: The government may be manipulating, even generating, UFO reports
to conceal secret programs.

This possibility was made more intriguing by a report that appeared in the
summer of 1997 suggesting the CIA and Air Force had been happy to have many
sightings of the U-2 and the A-12 classified as UFO sightings simply to hide the
existence of the planes. This was natural mutation at work. The report came in an
article by Gerald Haines, the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office,
which appeared in the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence. In “A Die Hard Issue:
CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90,” Haines declared that “over half of all
UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by
manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.” This
was especially true during the early days of its development, when the aircraft,
not yet painted black, were silver.

Such confusion was apparently officially encouraged, but there was no
evidence that it was actually suggested or directed. Later, things may have
become different. Haines recorded that one branch of the CIA, the OSI’s Life
Science Division, had “counterintelligence concerns” in the seventies and eighties
“that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain

information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs such as the Stealth
aircraft.” Such information mutations led to active disinformation. The Air Force,
Haines reported, was forced “to make misleading and deceptive statements to the
public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive
national security project.”

To understand how this might have evolved, one has to understand the mind¬
set of the Reagan era, a period I came to think of as the Second Cold War, a
renewal of hostility and fear after the detente of the seventies. Its beginnings can
be traced to Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as “the Evil
Empire”—the resemblance of the era’s language to that of the film Star Wars is
significant. The ideology of this second war, however, can be traced to a group of
advisers who believed that the Soviet threat was underestimated because it had
been cleverly disguised.

I had met one of the men who believed this. He had been a deputy director of
the CIA in the early seventies and was now in private business. He introduced me
to the concepts of maskirovka and dezinformatsiia —disinformation. Disinformation
was the buzzword of the resurgent youfer conspiracy theories of the eighties.

We met at a Denny’s restaurant near Washington. Somehow we got to talking
about the Blackbirds. He shook his head in lingering wonder at the Skunk Works,
and recounted the speed with which they had built the Blackbird. He seemed
nostalgic for those days, the years of the Evil Empire and Star Wars, when “active
counterintelligence”—Doty’s “legitimate lying”—was in vogue.

The man explained that he had debriefed a Warsaw Bloc defector, a Czech
named Jan Sejna, who told him that practically the whole Czech air defense
system was phony: wooden missiles, fake troops. The Soviets, he said, would run
whole schemes of bogus radio traffic and move out dummy equipment during the
periods when U.S. satellites passed overhead. It sounded all of a piece with the
infamous Soviet Air Force Day fly-by—the Hollywood trick of running the same
bombers past the reviewing stand again and again—that had inspired the bomber
gap.

This, he explained, was a technique long beloved of the Russians: maskirovka —
the use of disguises, tactical and strategic, of fake SAM sites, of airplanes that
flew around in circles in May Day-type parades, “bluffing up” the bomber forces
to suggest a bomber gap that the U-2 would have to seek out and debunk. There
was a Russian tradition, apparently, of the military Potemkin village.

There was also dezinformatsiia, he told me, the creation of phony programs,
documents, and informers. And who was to say the Soviets weren’t doing this on
the strategic as well as the tactical scale? Such thoughts were freely accepted at
hard-right institutions like the Hoover Institute. For men such as Sam Cohen, “the
father of the neutron bomb,” this raised larger questions: Were the missiles the
Soviets seemed to be placing in silos really there, or were they empty containers?

Were the real missiles stashed away on railcars traveling the vast and trackless
central expanse of the Soviet Union, in violation of all SALT treaties? This was a
popular line of thinking in the Reagan years; later the proponents of the B-2
Stealth bomber suggested that the huge flying wing would roam the countryside
searching out those missiles. In the traditional Cold War mode called “mirror¬
imaging”—if they’ve got a weapon, we also must have that same weapon—it
could also be taken as justification for an American effort in maskirovka and
disinformation. Thus the eighties became a period of “proactive” deception—
American disinformation to cover secret programs.

I had doubts about the whole premise. What if the defector himself was
disinformation, a plant? What if the fake missiles were real? If the goal had been
to spread doubt and uncertainty, it had worked. We, the enemy, were frozen if
we bought the story—either way. In this light it was worth considering whether
MJ-12 or at least the Bennewitz disinformation effort had been a kind of
counterintelligence maneuver.

The answer would likely never be known. John Pike, the Federation of
American Scientists expert on secrecy, was convinced there had been many active
counterintelligence programs surrounding Star Wars. He met a man who had
presented himself as a journalist for an industry newsletter and who claimed to
have a lot of useful information about Area 51. But, Pike would recall, “he
seemed more interested in telling than in asking,” and he subsequently seemed to
vanish into thin air. Active disinformation, he felt sure, had helped cover Star
Wars programs. And Star Wars’ relation to Dreamland was another mystery.

On March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “Star Wars,” or
“Strategic Defense Initiative,” speech. Within a year a huge effort was under way
to develop all sorts of high-tech antimissile weapons and energy beams. Black
budgets for weapons increased from $892 million in 1981 to $8.6 billion for
fiscal year 1987—and Dreamland would have been the natural place for testing
the aircraft, UAVs, lasers, high-frequency radio weapons, and other technologies.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization that had grown from the Star Wars
initiative was also the likely developer of the Tier III UAV, the legendary bat
plane that had been spotted around Dreamland.

These years naturally saw increased efforts in security as well, especially in the
area of disinformation, based on a reading of Soviet disinformation and
maskirovka. And psychological investigations of various types—such as those
developed at the R&D fringe of the CIA back in the days of blind LSD experiments
and brainwashing—seem to have increased.

The Lore is full of references to mind control experiments, but holographic
images are also a real possibility: The test of the ability of equipment to create
illusions would have been just the sort of thing that could produce strangely
moving lights above the Jumbled Hills.

Reagan believed in Wunderwaffe, wonder weapons. This belief was deeply
rooted in his Hollywood past, as the historian Garry Wills showed in his book
Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. The Star Wars-era ray guns were anticipated
in Reagan’s Brass Bancroft films of the thirties and forties, which introduced
similar themes. Murder in the Air, for instance, described an “inertia projector,” a
kind of force beam. Reagan was idealistic about the lasers: They were defensive,
just as the Lone Ranger uses his silver bullets not to kill people but to knock the
guns out of the hands of the bad guys. It was a dream of peace without
bloodshed.

With the military buildup, maneuvers and exercises increased. NATO was
flying entire armored divisions across the Atlantic to show that it could respond
to a Soviet invasion. Counterintelligence didn’t want to be left out. How do you
“go on maneuvers” in counterintelligence? Well, you run an active disinformation
campaign, targeted at producing a widespread belief in something. The target
could have been the American public at large or simply the UFO community, just
as the targets for SAC or for Stealth were, in practice runs, the cities and towns of
America.

The counterintelligence professionals included the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations. AFOSI, in charge of such matters as theft, drugs, procurement
violations, and the personal security of officers, is also in charge of
counterintelligence, which means preventing spying or other information leaks.
Some counterintelligence is defensive but most is offensive or proactive—the
creation of covers, such as the deceptive A-7 aircraft that were displayed as cover
for the Stealth fighter.

Some active disinformation documents, including faked Air Force letters and
reports, have been convincingly traced to AFOSI and to a Colonel Hennessey. He
was part of the AFOSI’s PJ section—which handled counterintelligence for secret
programs. When Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico wrote the General
Accounting Office inquiring about any government records having to do with
Majestic 12, the only interesting item the GAO came up with was a message
dated November 17, 1980, from the operations division of AFOSI, containing the
phrase “MJ Twelve.” AFOSI concluded that the message was a forgery.

Whether they were real, active disinformation, or amateur fakes, one of the
strongest pieces of evidence against the MJ-12 papers is the reference in one of
them to Area 51. By the best evidence, that designation had not been bestowed
by the Atomic Energy Commission until 1958. (Peter Merlin tracked it to the test
site bulletin, and mundane changes in phone numbers.) The area had not been
used for anything to speak of until Tony LeVier flew over it in 1955.

However, there is incontrovertible proof of the existence of “alien” craft at
Area 51—Soviet ones. The military tried to hide their existence, but it was
secretly very proud of the captured Soviet airplanes, furtively brought into the
area. And since they were there—denied, hidden—who was to say that yet other

alien craft were not there also?

17. Red Square, Red Hats, and STUDs

Press button for pleasure, reads the neatly routed Formica sign on the chain-link
at the Shamrock Lounge, near Lathrop Wells, west of Dreamland. The Shamrock
is one of several legal cathouses in Nevada’s Amargosa Valley, most little more
than a collection of trailers, linked together and fenced off.

If you had been inside the Shamrock, or in the cafe at Lathrop Wells, where old
men linger, sipping coffee and sopping up their gravy with sourdough biscuits,
late on the morning of March 26, 1984, you would have been distracted by the
boom of an airplane hitting the ground.

It was the sound of Maj. Gen. Robert Bond plunging into the ground and to his
death after losing control of his aircraft and smashing into a mountainside.

Secret planes become unsecret when they fall out of the sky. The news of a
mysterious airplane crash near Dreamland and the fact that a general was in the
cockpit meant the story could not be contained. There was immediate press
speculation that Bond had been flying a “super-secret new stealth airplane.”
Among UFO watchers, the speculation went further—had Bond been testing one
of the recovered saucers? As recently as 1991, in his book Cosmic Top Secret,
William Hamilton declared, “The Air Force refused to say what type of plane
Bond was flying at Area 51, but it seems highly irregular for the Air Force to use
a three-star general as a test pilot. Is it possible that the general was test flying a
recovered alien spacecraft?” In fact, Bond had been flying a MiG-23.

Bobby Bond was known around the Skunk Works as a stickler and worrier. A
hard-driving Tactical Air Command fighter type, he was also cleared on Stealth
and other secret programs. Bond’s crash brought the foreign technology program
to light. It was run by what was at one time called the Foreign Technology
Division out of Wright Patterson—exactly the place where the saucers were
supposed to be hidden. Foreign tech indeed.

The Lore held that other alien technology was buried more deeply in the
legendary Hangar 18, and alien bodies—some said dead, some said living—were
kept in tanks of liquid and cryogenic coolers. Where but the Foreign Technology
Division, the believers ask, would the Roswell bodies have been stored?

The only piece of alien flying technology ever photographed and positively
identified at Dreamland was not from Zeta Reticuli or any other system. It was a
MiG-21, captured in John Lear’s shot from the lake edge in September 1978. That
image confirmed what had long been suspected: that a program existed for
testing aircraft captured, stolen, bribed, or otherwise purloined from the Soviet

bloc.

Like a real-world shadow of the UFO testing programs of the Lore, the “Red
Hat” squadron program was highly secret, in order not to compromise the
sources of the planes—and the spare parts, engines, and tires needed to keep
them flying. The important secrets had to do not with enemies but with allies, as
Frank Powers was given to understand: The U-2 flights to be protected at all costs
were not those over the Soviet Union but those over Israel and Egypt, aimed at
the waning power of Great Britain and France.

It began in 1953, when the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division (now
Foreign Aerospace Technology Center) at Wright Patterson Air Force Base first
flew a Yak-23, smuggling it out of Eastern Europe, testing it from the Dayton
base as a U.S. “X-5” painted up in American insignia. When the testing was
finished, the airplane was smuggled back inside the Iron Curtain.

The “Black Yak” was followed only years later by a series of tests of MiGs,
called by the code names “Have Drill” and “Have Doughnut.” This was the work
of the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, the Red Hats, who wore red stars on
their patches, and the Air Technology intelligence center.

When Kelly Johnson had pushed for the Blackbird as a high-altitude
interceptor, he was thinking of war against the Soviet Union, of fleets of
incoming bombers, to be dispatched by look-down shoot-down radar, and
missiles. The Air Force envisioned fighter combat in largely the same terms: The
fighter bosses believed combat would take place without the two opposing
fighters ever seeing each other. They would lock on by radar at long distance. No
guns were necessary.

But dogfighting returned in Vietnam, with U.S. fighters facing North
Vietnamese MiGs. The F-4 Phantom was losing fights with MiGs at a disturbing
rate—one Phantom downed for every two MiGs.

In the Six-Day War, the Israelis acquired a number of the Soviet planes from
captured airfields, defectors, or—in one case—when Libyan pilots landed at a
Sinai base they did not know had already been taken by the Israelis. They are the
probable source of a MiG-17 obtained by the Defense Intelligence Agency in
1967, the first one to fly in Dreamland. Later, the United States would acquire—
just how remains a mystery—a MiG-21, Su-22s, and MiG-23s, and by the nineties
even an Su-27 Flanker, the most advanced Russian aircraft.

After France cut off sales of Mirage fighters to Israel, to placate the Arab
nations that provided its oil, the United States struck an agreement to sell the
Israelis planes and made captured MiGs part of the price.

Soon men in the ranks at Nellis AFB began jokingly referring to the box of
restricted airspace around the secret base as Red Square.

In the project called Have Drill, the Red Hats flew the MiG-17 from Groom

Lake in simulated dogfights over the desert to figure out its strengths and
weaknesses. The MiG performed better than the Phantom at low speeds—it could
turn “inside” the F-4 every time—but if the F-4 pilot kept speeds up and stayed
outside and behind, he could win. Using the tactics developed at Groom, the
Navy produced a film called Throw a Nickel on the Grass (a line from an old Navy
fliers’ song) and brought in classes of pilots for retraining. By the end of the war,
the kill ratio had shifted to eight-to-one.

At the 1969 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, the talk among the pilots turned
to MiGs. A number of admirals were flown up to Groom and put through the
paces in the captured aircraft.

In the eighties, with more aircraft acquired through Afghanistan, a new
program called Constant Peg was set up at Tonopah. The Red Eagles, as they
were called, were part of the same 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron. They
trained Navy as well as Air Force pilots and, after carrier-based fighters shot
down two Libyan MiGs in 1989, a Pentagon spokesman, in a moment of pride
overcoming tact, bragged that the successful pilots had been trained in enemy
aircraft.

With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the foreign-
technology boys set their sights even higher. It was the military yard sale of all
time, and by 1993 the American taxpayer was spending half a billion dollars per
year for “foreign material acquisitions.”

Trader (aka Paul McGinnis) tracked down the cost of running one evaluation
program—he could rattle off the number by heart—the program with element
number 207248F. The program behind the number was called STUDs, for
“special tactical unit detachments.” It is hard to believe that any connotations
with regard to this acronym are other than intentional. From fiscal 1993 to 1994
STUDs went from $885,000 to $20 million, and to $118 million for 1995.

Many of the foreign aircraft have probably come into the country by
surreptitious sale or bribe. They may even include advanced prototypes
purchased from a renegade general or engineer. But there was a limit to the
process—a classic catch-22. All military systems are supposed to involve fair
competition among different contractors or suppliers, with a request for proposals
and evaluation. But since the “source” of the MiGs was not only “sole” but secret
and clandestine, the Pentagon could hardly hold competitions among the corrupt
Warsaw bloc colonels or Third World defectors who could provide the hardware.

MiGs might be confused with saucers, but they still looked like fighters when
you got a clear look. They did not look like the strange flying beast I had seen at
the boneyard, nor did they look anything like the far stranger shapes that had
flown above Groom Lake and whose cousins were about to come into plain sight.

18. El Mirage and Darkstar

Tumbleweeds cleared, read the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of
the nature of local enterprise. This was the desert east of Palmdale, California,
center of America’s high-tech aerospace industry.

I had passed Plant 42, where the B-2 bomber was hatched. The new Skunk
Works was nearby, its huge hangars crisply painted in a gray worthy of the most
shipshape vessel in the Navy.

The road ran east from “Aerospace Valley,” formally known as the Antelope
Valley, although no such animal has been seen there for years. Instead, you saw
the new malls, Kmarts, and fast-food franchises, giving way eventually to acres of
sod farms and fruit trees. The map showed a huge expanse of lettered avenues
and numbered streets, the projection of a vast city dreamed up by some wildly
optimistic boosters. It centered around a planned super-airport that had never
been built; the map even showed the runways and terminal sites.

It resembled one of the Nazca earth markers that Erich von Daniken thought
represented a landing strip for the gods. It was a dream airport, as if for the ghost
craft watchers frequently saw here—the mother ship, the giant triangles, the bats
and whales. An airport of the imagination, I thought, like the airbase of the
imagination at Dreamland.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught the same evil-looking shape I had seen at
the boneyard many years before. The spot was Blackbird Park, a strip of grass
near the Lockheed Skunk Works where examples of its proudest works are
parked: A-12 and SR-71 Blackbird aircraft. Beside them sat the little craft I now
knew was a D-21 drone, the last of the Blackbirds, kept secret for years, which
had flown from the back of an SR-71, then from beneath the wing of a B-52.

It was a transitional design between a manned spy plane and a UAV—
unmanned aerial vehicle. The engineers called it a “parasite.” Once released from
the back of the Blackbird, the D-21 was automatically guided. Out of control of
any ground station, it would pass over a target—the denied area—and
photograph it, then fly to a friendly country and land by parachute.

It weighed several tons, a chunky cylindrical shape with stubby wings and tail
that clearly suggested the SR-71; it was like a larval version of the big craft. The
whole project was called Tagboard.

The D-21 foreshadowed a new generation of UAVs. I wondered if many of the
shapes flying out of Dreamland were not of this type. Unmanned craft could and
did take on shapes that were, in the words of many observers of things flying

above Groom Lake, “otherworldly.” Because they did not have cockpits or
windows, because they did not need to provide protection for a human pilot, they
could be more batlike or more saucer-shaped. They could be pumpkin-seed¬
shaped.

How many UAVs, flying secretly, had been taken for UFOs? And how many
others had been hidden as well as the D-21 had been? How many aerial sharks
and mantas?

Mine was not the only suspicion. The first assumption, incidentally, of those
who encountered flying saucers was oftentimes the same as my own: They must
be secret planes of some sort. The famous front page of the Roswell Daily Record,
now reproduced on thousands of T-shirts and in many books that proclaimed the
“capture” of a saucer or disc, also included a story on “man in the street”
reactions. H. M. Dow of Roswell declared, “I have come to the conclusion that
there are some disks flying and I think it is an experiment of some tactical branch
of our armed forces.” One Rolla Hinkle opined that “the United States
government is trying out something new. These disks may be radio-controlled
instruments of some kind.”

I drove past old ranches, with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors,
looking for a very different kind of airplane. I was heading for El Mirage. The dry
lake there had long been a favored spot for hotrodders and motorcyclists, who
cut loops and doughnuts into its surface. For artists, too, it was a useful canvas.
In the late sixties and early seventies, earth artists had created temporary
sculptures here. Inspired in part by the vast canvas of the desert, one had poured
strips of asphalt on El Mirage in an X shape that looked from the air like the little
x of the airstrips at Dreamland when Kelly Johnson and Tony LeVier had first
flown over them. Another artist had sliced long trenches into the lake bed to
define “negative space” and what were called “nonsites.” Weren’t the Air Force
and CIA into “nonsites” too when they ran bases they wouldn’t acknowledge?

I had just parked next to an old aircraft boneyard when I caught sight of it: a
tiny fleck that came closer, turning into what looked like a giant white paper
plane, with wing tabs turned down, wheeling over the small airfield. But the
strangest thing was its nose—it had no cockpit, no windows. It looked blind.

There were no windows because there was no pilot. This was Predator, the
most recent UAV, flying for the CIA and the military, being tested at the El
Mirage desert airstrip of its builder, General Atomics, Inc.

For a long time, we didn’t even have a good name for these things. Once, they
were dismissively called “drones,” then “remotely piloted vehicles.” By the mid¬
nineties, the term of choice had become UAVs, and in the Pentagon the field was
chic. A new generation of UAVs was arriving, relying on advances in electronics
and computing, miniaturized sensors and cameras and relay systems. Today’s

UAVs are spy planes; tomorrow’s will be fighters.

For years, UAVs inhabited a world of their own, a shadow of a shadow.
Overlooked, ignored, they never attracted the kind of attention the black planes
did. Before they became fashionable, how long had they been flying out of
Dreamland?

Even the most famous of imagined Dreamland projects may have been a UAV:
The “Glossary of Aerospace Terms and Abbreviations” in the September 1994
issue of Air International claimed Aurora is an acronym for Automatic Retrieval
Of Remotely-piloted Aircraft. And the builder of the huge Perseus UAV for NASA
was a company called ... Aurora.

Hovering high above unfriendly countries, their proponents say, UAVs can
relay via satellite to distant ground stations video, radar, or infrared images of
anything that moves. “Lingering” is the favored term. The Predator, for instance,
can fly three hundred miles and “linger” for up to two days in the air, where it is
virtually invisible to the human eye and difficult for radar to spot. (Despite a
fifty-foot wingspan, it shows up only as a square meter radar “signature.”)

Proponents have proclaimed the dawn of a new era in aviation and a new kind
of pilot—the right stuff of the future. The joystick in the cockpit may be replaced
by one on the desktop, and Top Gun may be replaced by Captain Nolo—
traditional Air Force lingo for “no live operator.”

Like robots of any sort, UAVs have the advantage of requiring no room and
board, no training or food. They can pull more G’s than human pilots (fighter
aircraft are limited in their acceleration and deceleration not by the strength of
their airframes but by the G-tolerance of the human body). Cases of “temporary
interruption of consciousness”—blackouts—have been suspected in several
crashes over the last few years, including General Bond’s. UAVs cannot be held
hostage or suffer torture. Politically, UAVs benefit from the new post-Cold
War/post-Gulf War emphasis on inexpensive high-tech weapons that avoid
putting human lives at risk. And of course UAVs cost less than manned aircraft.
Predator was tagged at just $1.6 million per craft.

A couple of days after I saw it in the air, four Predators were on their way to
the former Yugoslavia to conduct round-the-clock observation of forces on the
ground. Predator, a so-called Tier II UAV, follows the Tier I “Gnat 750,” which
was less successful when tried out by the CIA from Albanian bases.

That afternoon I drove back west, straight up to the gray and blue buildings of
the Lockheed Skunk Works—it was the post-Cold War Skunk Works now, as
neatly groomed and carefully patrolled as any Hollywood set, properly outfitted
as the high holy of American aviation. I had come to watch the unveiling of
Darkstar.

Inside the hangar called Building 602, we were given press kits in neat black

folders. Representatives were there to brief us. Until 2:28, when the curtain was
to be pulled back, “the configuration was sight sensitive” and therefore officially
classified. Lockheed, Boeing, DARPA, and DARO, the Defense Airborne
Reconnaissance Office, were all partners in the project, and the craft, they told
us, would go from drawing board to first flight in an unprecedentedly short
twelve months.

“How,” I asked later, “was such rapid development possible? Were there other
programs that helped?”

They were, the DARPA man said, able to rely on experience from other
programs.

“Could you tell what those programs were?”

“I could,” he said, “but I won’t.” General laughter ensued.

The room was darkened. There was a great rumbling sound from above. I
looked up and saw that the yellow roof crane that spanned the whole hangar was
sliding slowly in the dark, a cluster of orange lights on its center, pulling back the
black curtain. As stirring music played, dry ice spread a soft and ghostly fog
around the craft: a white object that looked like nothing so much as a flying
saucer with a large porthole. It took a few seconds to see that narrow wings grew
from the saucer. It was just like the rollouts I had seen in Detroit for new cars—
music, stage effects, lights: technology as theater.

One eager young PR person running around seemed to have nothing to do. I
collared him and asked what music was playing. He disappeared and returned in
a few minutes with the answer: It was from the Disney film The Rocketeer, based
on a comic book about a man with a rocket backpack. The film and the music
evoked the romantic days of aviation, when Howard Hughes was setting flight
records and making movies, and the alliance of Hollywood and aerospace was
being formed. The name Darkstar was taken from John Carpenter’s mid-seventies
film about the crew of a roving spaceship.

Darkstar was the new so-called Tier III Minus UAV. The “Tier” designations are
DARPA project names, bestowed by a law, the “Section 845—Other Agreements
Authority,” that gave DARPA special powers for prototype development outside
the normal channels of Pentagon procurement procedures. The Tier designations
had been dreamed up to delineate the pecking order of UAVs by size, cost, and
stealthiness. No one knew how, but Lockheed had managed to develop Darkstar
in a matter of months. Rumor held that Darkstar was the son of a UAV called Tier
III. By interesting coincidence, that name echoed “TR3A,” the name of the Manta,
the craft Steve believed he had spotted in Roswell. Tier 3—TR3. Was there a
secret meaning? Or just a general confusion?

Predator is Tier I; Tier II Plus or “Global Hawk” was being constructed by
Teledyne Ryan in San Diego and could fly at 65,000 feet for twenty-four hours or

more. Darkstar was Tier III Minus. It cruised at 180 miles per hour using a single
jet engine buried inside what looks like a porthole. It could fly as high as 45,000
feet and survey some 1,600 square miles with synthetic aperture radar or electro-
optical cameras. But its flying-saucer-like shape would make it more stealthy
than the Tier II Plus. It had been, the briefers said, “optimized for low
observables”; in other words, made to look like a saucer to avoid radar detection.

By talking to Interceptors and their network, I got an idea what the programs
that could have aided in Darkstar’s creation might be. One program was the
Senior Prom stealthy cruise missile that had been tested at Dreamland. Another
was Tier III itself, which the Lore said was also called “Q.” According to various
accounts, it was a successor to the Aurora debacle, an offspring of Lockheed’s
unsuccessful, alternative design for what became the B-2 bomber. It was a flying
wing with a 150- or 220-foot wingspan. Others said that it, too, was a debacle.
Two had been constructed and flown, manned, from the Groom Lake runway, but
the program had been canceled because the cost of the individual aircraft had
risen to nearly a billion dollars.

After the smoke and the oohs and aahs faded away, I talked to Maj. Gen. Ken
Israel, the head of DARO, which along with DARPA, the agency that gave us the
original Stealth fighter, had developed Darkstar.

General Israel used to fly in an EB-66 electronic spy plane probing Soviet
electronics defenses. Now he quotes Shakespeare and touts the future of UAVs as
a revolution in aviation. Israel’s leading arguments for UAVs are humanistic: “In
the next century, we will definitely rely more on pilotless aircraft to place people
out of harm’s way.” But he also speaks in the terms of the new Pentagon fashion
—“infowar.” “We need to know what’s on the battlefield before we get on the
battlefield.” With its ability to linger over an area, Israel says, a UAV can “view
the battlefield with impunity.” It can give the generals not just desktop info war
but real time infowar.

Look, too, he says, at “cost of ownership.” The SR-71 Blackbird costs $38,000
an hour to fly, and a U-2 $6,000 an hour; a UAV costs only $2,000 an hour.
These were craft for the post-Cold War world: cost-conscious, self-promoting,
and aimed at very different enemies than Curtis LeMay’s bombers had been.

The logic for UAVs had been obvious to some for years. Kelly Johnson predicted
twenty years ago that they were the future of military aviation.

“UAVs are part of the great American tradition of substituting technology for
human beings,” says Randy Harrison, a member of the Darkstar team at Boeing.
The Gulf War, and especially the difficulty of locating SCUDs on the ground, gave
impetus to UAV proponents.

While for most American TV viewers the Gulf War seemed a model of

information efficiency and intelligence gathering, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and
other generals complained about their lack of “real time” information. The
images we saw of smart bombs riding lasers down air vents were actually films,
carried back to base and developed. Real information about enemy targets was
much harder for the generals to get from space or the air. By the time satellite
and other images reached the field from Washington, the tanks had often moved,
the SCUDs shifted.

To be sure, this was the classic case of fighting the last war, but it also offered
a look at the information war of the future.

General Israel and his friends imagine a war fought with batlike robot planes.
Their strategy for overcoming conservative resistance is clever: “We are like Billy
Mitchell,” he said, invoking the prophet of airpower and his struggle for
acceptance. The aspirations of UAVs to be real fighting aircraft are hinted at by
their names: Hunter, Raptor, Talon, and Predator—pretty aggressive for mere
reconnaissance craft. There is no reason at all, Israel says, that UAVs could not
take over the job of the manned interceptor—that Captain Nolo could not
supplant Chuck Yeager. And if the Pentagon goes to war with UAVs, won’t the TV
networks need them too? They will act as the high-tech equivalent of the news
chopper.

The next step will be to use UAVs as target designators: eyes in the sky that
will “paint” targets with lasers for smart bombs to ride down. The incentive for
the UAV to replace the fighter, despite our affection for the chivalry and heroism
of the dogfight, also comes as a result of the Gulf War. The Vietnam syndrome
has been replaced by the Gulf War syndrome: total intolerance of casualties or
the national humiliation of having pilots become prisoners displayed for the TV
cameras.

Cases in point go back as far as Francis Gary Powers in 1960. But another
conveniently popped up the very day after the Darkstar unveiling, when an F-16
was shot down over Bosnia carrying pilot Scott McGrady. With UAVs, there
would be less need to send manned aircraft over such areas, and considerably less
chance of pilots becoming hostages or pawns. A couple of days after McGrady
was rescued, the decision was made to send the Predator over Bosnia. Had it
been used earlier, it might have warned of the SAMs on the ground.

Studying Darkstar at the unveiling was a man in a blue fatigue cap and a leather
A-2 jacket of the sort pilots wear. Lt. Col. Jim Greenwood was an RSO—the
observer or backseat man in an SR-71—from 1986 to 1990. Now that America’s
dearth of aerial reconnaissance tools had led the Pentagon to pull the Blackbird
out of mothballs, he was getting ready to fly again.

In the meantime he had become a proponent of UAVs—one of the few within
the Air Combat Command, the fighter pilot’s command. “Hey, it’s a pilot’s air
force,” Colonel Greenwood admits. Some pilots will resist UAVs to their last

breath. But as for computers replacing the “human element” at the controls,
Greenwood notes, that began happening long ago.

Computers fly airplanes much more often than pilots like to admit. Commercial
airliners full of passengers are more readily trusted to computer systems than to
human pilots during bad weather landings. Many aircraft, such as the F-117
Stealth fighter, are unstable without controlling computers.

The first controllers for Darkstar, Greenwood told me, would be trained pilots.
“But in the future, you might take people straight off the street and give them
pilot training, instrument rating, and then have them stop flying real planes and
go to UAV school.” The prospect of video-game stars taking over for the Top Gun
hotshots did not seem to faze the colonel. “Gotta go,” he said. “I’ve got a date
with a T-38.” Not half an hour later, he was arcing skyward at a steep angle, in
the sort of airplane that may one day seem as quaint as a Sopwith Camel.

No one was quite sure yet whether the operator of a UAV should still be called a
pilot. Captain Nolo flew the drones of the past, but today’s UAVs don’t
necessarily need any pilot at all. Darkstar is programmed to roll out of the
hangar, take off, fly its mission, land, and return to the hangar without human
intervention. The Predator, by contrast, is directed by a joystick kind of
mechanism. Darkstar uses Global Positioning System satellites to determine its
location. Its flight plan can be changed in mid-course, but its interface is a series
of maps and graphs of way points, a software system manipulated by mouse and
keyboard.

The first official squadron of Air Force UAVs, I learned, the Eleventh
Reconnaissance Squadron, commanded by Col. Steven L. Hampton, was already
taking shape at Indian Springs. This, by happy chance, was also where Bob Lazar
was debriefed. It was one of the places where legend said saucer wreckage was
stored.

How many UFOs were UAVs? I still couldn’t say, nor could anyone. But the Air
Force was about to give confirmation of the existence of one of the strangest
shapes that had ever been spotted in Dreamland.

19. The Remote Location

“Long ago,” the general’s speech began, “in a galaxy far, far away” ... It was a
reference to Star Wars that may or may not have been freighted with implicit
criticism of the $40 billion weapons program of the same name. He was
introducing a plane that the Interceptors had seen and talked about for years,
though the military had denied its existence. A black plane that had flown only at
Dreamland was coming into the light.

Outside the Air Force Museum in Dayton, a color guard presented arms;
dignitaries straightened their ties. On the back of the chair in front of me was
stenciled a collection of numbers and letters and the words usaf chair folding.

Interceptors were there in number. A man with a name I knew only from the
Internet, where he provided specifications of aircraft present and past, right
down to the tail numbers, wore a Lockheed Skunk Works T-shirt—a bit tactless, I
thought, considering this was a Northrop project. He took pictures of everything
that moved, including one of the cargo planes that flew overhead, then looked
around a little sheepishly.

Before coming to the Air Force Museum, this airplane had been legendary at
Groom Lake, open only to the handful of officers with all the necessary
clearances. Again the strange principle seemed to hold true: To get close to
Dreamland, you had to go far away. In Ohio we were getting a glimpse into the
heart of Nevada, at a plane that had somehow traveled from rumor and suspicion
to commemoration with no visible stops in between. Perhaps this was why the
ceremony in Dayton seemed an odd mix—half confession, half celebration.

When the curtain was drawn, it was clear this was the ugliest aircraft most of
the audience had ever seen. It was long and stubby-winged, hard to put the
shapes together in your head to make a whole you could imagine flying. It looked
like someone’s effort to build a big fiberglass boat from magazine plans,
abandoned halfway through. From the rear, it looked like some sort of modern
architectural model, a building in Brasilia, say, the exhaust vent a rising curve,
like a concrete amphitheater.

It actually looked like Shamu, the star whale of Ocean World, and this became
the nickname that stuck. The men who built it called themselves “whalers” and
wore little lapel pins in the shape of a whale. That way, they could go out into
the soft liberal world full of save-the-whale types and blend right in.

They had worked in a hangar beside the Stealth prototype Have Blue. For a
long time, each of the two groups was forced to stay inside while the other was

outside with its airplane: special access, need-to-know. It was the other team,
getting a glimpse, that called it the Whale.

Whale was right: For the Interceptors, this was a kind of Moby-Dick, a great
white whale of a genuinely mysterious flying object, long-sought, long-denied,
legendary and mythical, now finally admitted. But material replaced mystery
with a thud: The physical object was rough and ugly. It was also weird. The first
thing I thought after seeing it was Who, describing such a thing floating over his
head, would have been believed? Who then could not have had his certainty
shaken that all flying objects were of terrestrial origin? With revelations
surprising as this, how certain were we that there might not indeed be a Hangar
18, here at Wright-Pat or elsewhere, where alien bodies, creatures, parts,
wreckage might be hidden? 1

“There was a remarkable esprit” to the project, the speeches all agreed, born of
the isolation of “the remote location,” the silence of the black world, the
camaraderie of the initiate. “We even did our phenomenology work in remote
locations,” said Stephen Smith, one of the top managers for Shamu. By
phenomenology he meant radar testing. You could see the huge antenna from
Freedom Ridge, and the big balloon balls used to calibrate it. These words
suggested to me, however, the same old problem with Dreamland: that of
knowing what was real and what was mere perception, speculation, rumor,
fantasy. Of seeing and believing.

Patriotism, the dignitaries claimed, drove the project, even though it was not
wartime. Steve Smith recalled “a strong sense of patriotic urgency with respect to
Warsaw Pact nations at that time.” In other words, fear of a big offensive in
Europe that would overwhelm Allied ground forces and cause the United States
to go nuclear. Shamu was designed to hover above a battlefield, using radars to
direct thousands of “precision-guided munitions” at the hordes of invading tanks.

“There’s a reception inside, under the B-36,” the museum director announced,
and the Whalers headed inside to stand under the wing of the huge plane.
According to a sign, this was the last B-36 ever to fly, when it was ferried on
April 30, 1959, from the boneyard at Davis-Monthan to Dayton.

At the reception, Steve Smith explained that he was working in Iran in the
seventies, helping the shah’s air force with its new F-20s, when the call came
from his boss. He was being sent back for a special project, but was to be told
nothing else until he was “brought in.”

He was briefed on the third floor of a dark parking garage at a hotel in the San
Fernando Valley, he recalled, “like Deep Throat. It was real cloak-and-dagger
stuff.”

The man in charge of the Tacit Blue program also stood beside the B-36. Jack
Twigg was an Air Force colonel, detached to DARPA. Twigg was perfect for the

part, always looking as if he were laughing at some private joke. He was never
seen out of a sport coat, shirt, and tie, Smith recalled. “Everyone thought he
worked for us, for Northrop.”

“I had the haircut,” Twigg interrupted with the air of a man who always likes
to be in charge. “I had the crew cut, and that was the only thing that gave me
away.”

Most of the wives and many children were at the ceremony. And that
illuminated something it was easy to dismiss: that working in secrecy diminished
the lives of the workers. It’s not just that they couldn’t answer the question,
“Daddy, what did you do at work today?” but that their family lives could be
jeopardized by the black hole of nondisclosure, which could quickly fill with
suspicion. Security, one black worker said, was like wearing a lead raincoat.

The question could never be avoided: Was it really the job, or was it something
else? A guy could be making it all up because he had a bimbo in Burbank, a
floozy in Floral Park—hell, a whole second family someplace, or a bad gambling
habit, or an unsavory job with organized crime. There were cases of con artists
who pretended to be working in Dreamland, or some other secret facility, or for
the Skunk Works.

Was there any sharper symbol of the isolation of the black world than the
“hello” phone, the one-way dead-end telephone number given to families of those
working at secret facilities like Dreamland?

In Blue Sky Dream, his memoir of growing up with a father who worked in SAR
programs, David Beers gives a child’s viewpoint of all this. His father worked on
Star Wars projects for Lockheed’s missile division, near the mysterious Blue Cube,
the spy satellite control center in Sunnyvale, and during the eighties was
dispatched to a place that may very well have been Dreamland.

He was gone for days and weeks to a place the mysterious people on the phone
called The Ranch.

“Hal there?” an extremely serious male voice would ask whoever picked up
the receiver at my parents’ house.

“No, can I tell him who called?”

“Tell him Gunner called. From The Ranch. He’ll know.”

What was this Ranch where Ronald Reagan had created new work for my
father and for “Gunner” and for how many more? My mother and her children
were curious, of course, but we had only the slimmest of details with which to
construct a mental picture. We knew a man would find himself in some very
high and precarious places at The Ranch, because one time my father returned
wearing a strange pair of glasses, clunky plastic frames bought off a drugstore
rack. He had lost his, he said, “while stepping onto a catwalk. I bumped my
head and off came my glasses. I heard them hit the floor about, oh, eight to ten

seconds later.” My father smiled as he said this, smiling as he tended to smile
when he had just told you something that was very intriguing but just shy of
violating his security oath.

We knew The Ranch was a place that could be very dark, because another
time my father came back with a scabbed cut in his forehead. All he would tell
us is that he had been driving across some dim landscape in the middle of the
night in a rental car with the lights off and he had run into something and his
head had been thrown forward into the steering wheel. “Why were you driving
in the dark with no lights?” his wife and children wanted to know. But his
answer was a smile.

To spy, you must agree to be spied on. To create a spy plane, you must agree to
have your phone tapped, take lie-detector tests, have your background and
clearance reviewed every five years.

That was the cost of working in Dreamland. Indeed, this seemed to be the key
reason for the ceremony and the revelation of Shamu. At last the wives and the
children, now grown, could be told. On black projects such as Shamu, Smith said,
“All normal methods of communication are avoided, all identities and
relationships are denied. Total isolation is the goal, and this caused hardship.”
Divorce rates are high in black projects.

When the Air Force first began operating the Stealth fighter at Tonopah, it flew
only at night. As a result, the pilots slept during the day. When they returned
home on weekends, they would either continue to sleep all day, ignoring their
families, or try, usually in vain, to switch their sleeping schedules, leaving them
groggy and irritable. Some said they felt like vampires. Many pilots complained
of a nagging exhaustion they could not shake. One of them was Ross Mulhare,
who died in July 1986 when he flew his Stealth fighter into a hillside near
Bakersfield. Mulhare’s family did not know what he was doing during the days he
disappeared into the desert south of Tonopah, but they did know that he had to
take a lie-detector test every three months.

Those who work on black projects must sign an agreement to respect the
secrecy of information protected within Special Access Programs, called Sensitive
Compartmented Information. These agreements, which for earlier programs were
carried out under Reagan-era Executive Order 12356, involve an explanation of
the system and “indoctrination.” Those inside understand they can be punished—
fined and sent to prison for years—under sections 793, 794, 798, and 952 of Title
18 of the U.S. Criminal Code.

Secondhand accounts of the black world abound with tales of persuasive
briefings punctuated by shouting and the near proximity of the muzzle of an M-
16 rifle to the subject’s face. You will disappear, they are told. One former Red
Hat flier simply took it for granted that people who talked about the program
would disappear.

But the real teeth of the system, the tools for ensuring secrecy, are much more
mundane: the threat of the end of a career, of loss of a pension, the regular
administration of polygraph tests, the monitoring of phone calls and mail, the
careful registration and tracing of the disposition of controlled documents and
computer files. The Office of Special Investigations or FBI may also tap phones
and watch the movements of employees and even family members.

With these tactics it is much easier to keep secrets than one would think. At
first the black world was a world of intelligence—information. But beginning
with the Manhattan Project, black methods were applied to the development of
hardware—not just knowing things but building things. The Western
Development Division of Air Research and Development in 1951, the first U.S.
effort to develop an ICBM, was another early black program. Funding for these
comes from budget lines with code names or vague headings. Some, like the U-2,
were funded from various CIA funds. But the CIA is only one of some thirty-eight
U.S. intelligence agencies, departments, and divisions, and its $2 billion budget is
dwarfed by that of the National Security Agency.

Today, entire categories of operations are black as well: the SIOP (single-
integrated operating plan) for fighting a nuclear war, “continuity of government”
plans following a nuclear war, or antiterrorist operations, for instance.

The biggest misunderstanding about secrecy is that it is a matter of levels, that
higher clearance gives one access to more stuff. In fact, the key is not vertical but
horizontal—in compartmentalization. The engineers building a Stealth fighter are
separated from those building a laser weapon; being cleared for one highly secret
project does not mean access to another.

For this reason, the black system was developed with almost scholastic rigidity.
Beyond such commonly known stamps as Top Secret or Classified are code
warnings like WINTEL: Warning Notice—intelligence sources and methods
involved; ORCON, originator controls access and distribution; NORFORM,
meaning not to be seen by foreign nationals; NO CONTRACT, meaning not to be
seen by contractors.

Categories of information had names different from those of the sources of that
information, as part of the compartmentalization process. Such names are almost
a parody of themselves. Readers of John le Carre will be familiar with the use of
separate code names for a body of intelligence information and its source. The
material called “Witchcraft,” for example, is produced from a source called
“Merlin.”

In the fully developed Cold War system, categories of intelligence had names
like Umbra and Spoke. Gamma was the name for intercepts of various Soviet
communications. (It was also applied in 1969 to the program of spying on
American leaders in their protests against the Vietnam War.) A whole host of “G”
words—Gant, Gabe, Gyro, Gut, Gult, Goat—some real words, some made up,

were used for specific categories of these intercepts: Gamma Guppy, for instance,
was the name for overheard telephone conversations of Soviet leaders being
driven around Moscow in their limos. It seemed to consist largely of gossip about
their various mistresses.

Secret hardware programs received special names, like the Byeman names for
spy satellites. The U-2 was Aquatone and Idealist. Discoverer covered Corona, the
first spy satellite. But it was in the naming of research programs like Teal Rain
and Have Blue by the services, and by such agencies as DARPA, that the new
tone of the black world emerged. Something else works to protect secrecy: a
sense of fraternity, the qualities of a secret society, a sense of belonging to
something special. (“Special” is a key word in the Pentagon. “Special weapons”
are nukes; “special operations” are commandos.) To define a group, a cult, a
religion, not only are certain key words used but certain words are not used. In
the black world, there are terms that are never spoken aloud, like the true name
of God. You never say Groom Lake—you say “the Ranch,” or “the remote
location.” And rarely do you even say black.

There were also active efforts to penetrate security—like LeMay’s old security
testers in SAC—and others listening in on family phone calls and watching
employees to see that the penetrators were not succeeding.

“There were many efforts to do this,” one of the Whalers told me, adding
proudly, “To my knowledge, none of them were successful.”

“Were there also,” I asked, “active disinformation efforts or cover stories?”

“You’d have to ask the professionals about that,” he answered.

The professionals. AFOSI? FBI? When I did ask them, of course, I got the
inevitable “We can’t talk about that.”

Besides the little whale lapel button, many of the whalers wore another pin: a
diamond arrowhead, icon of the Pioneers of Stealth, the loose organization of
black-world engineers who had worked on Stealth and now met for occasional
reunions in a wave of nostalgia for those early days.

To the Interceptors, all this lent the hope that more craft that the Air Force and
contractors had been hiding might soon emerge, other unidentified flying craft,
like the Manta or Aurora. Like Q or the Tier III, which might or might not be the
same thing. Q was said in the Lore to stand for “quantum leap in technology.” It
was also a traditional, even legendary designation for the top security clearance.
Q, depending on which tales you believed, was either a successor to the failed
Aurora or its code name. Or was Aurora a cover story for Q?

I hung around several of the pioneers, and eavesdropped as they spoke of their
next reunion. Two of them were talking about the conclave. I gathered that an
invitation would not be forthcoming. They discussed who might be attending.

Several names were mentioned, then one asked, “And who should we invite from
Q?”

Before the ceremony, I had walked around the base and the museum, trying to
understand how Tacit Blue fit into the aviation history laid out there like a
diagram. I was surprised by how open and green the place felt. I had not realized
that the base was built around Huffman Prairie, the Wright Brothers’ flying field.
Today Wright-Pat is huge, three airfields in all, and it is the center of the Air
Force Systems command, the MIT and CalTech of aviation high-tech. It is also the
home of the Foreign Technology section—perfect for investigating captured MiGs
and, as the youfers believed, wreckage from Roswell or other saucer crashes.

Even if there is no Hangar 18, no “level 5” where the Roswell bodies are
supposed to be on ice, plenty of buildings here looked right for the part: odd
tanks and pipes, cubes and spheres, weird-shaped wind tunnels, all decorated
with wisps of mysterious vapor.

20. The Anthill and Other Burlesques

The myth of Hangar 18 in Dayton would continue to grow. No report on it has
failed to mention how Senator Barry Goldwater was not allowed access to the
building, even with his top clearance. It was well known that he had tried to get
Curtis LeMay to let him in. On the Internet, Robert Collins had recently posted an
elaborate report on “underground vaults at WPAFB” based on inside sources and
infrared photography.

At Wright-Pat they find all this exasperating. They receive inquiries daily.
When Frank Kuznik, reporter for Air & Space magazine, visited the base for a
story, he found irritated scientists tired of dealing with the inquiries. No, there
was no Hangar 18 or any vaults full of bodies. But if there were, “Do you think
we’d tell you? Don’t you think we’d be able to hide it?” Another scientist
declared that he wished they did have something alien to put on display, because
at just a dollar a head they would certainly make enough money to solve his
budget problems.

Long before Area 51 meant anything, Hangar 18 had seeped in to popular
consciousness. Now Area 51 was becoming a larger version of Hangar 18. But
around Dreamland, deeper, darker vaults were suspected.

John Lear held that the Skunk Works had moved from Burbank to Tejon
Canyon, the Northrop radar cross-section (RCS) range west of Palmdale, the
better to hide sinister projects. To him and to others, that facility was “the
Anthill,” where aliens ruled, incubating hybrid humans, gathering abductees for
their vital enzymes. Deep in the night, these watchers say, the portals open to
emit flying saucers from structures beneath, extending five, ten, even fifty stories
below the ground. According to Gary Schultz of Secret Saucer Base Expeditions,
the erstwhile self-appointed expert on Area 51 and the leader of regular trips to
the perimeter, “We have found out with incontrovertible proof” that the RCS is
only a cover, that the Anthill has forty-two levels underground. Things come
streaming out of there at night, the tales went. There are reports of mysterious
blue beams and “surveillance orbs the size of basketballs.”

Schultz had flown over it in September 1991. He had seen evidence of concrete
being poured twenty-four hours a day for weeks—a million cubic yards of
concrete. The skeptic will ask, Where were all the cement mixers lined up? And
where was all the dirt?

Those who believed in the underground bases suspected not only the Anthill
but all the RCS facilities. These strange installations look like Dreamland should
look but doesn’t: They have mysterious concrete tilting walls, diamond-shaped

pads and panels, shadowed overhangs, James Bond-like facilities of the sort that
leap to the imagination at the very utterance of the phrase “Area 51.” They are
the radar cross-section facilities of the western deserts, the local chapels of
stealth, landmarks of the Greater Dreamland: Gray Butte, Tejon Canyon,
Helendale, China Lake, White Sands. Hey kids, collect ’em all! And the
Interceptors did—they would make trips to each of the facilities. Tom Mahood
even tracked down their ownership in real estate registers and public records.

From the air, they are especially sinister, their runways painted with the

warning, RESTRICTED runway do not land.

There is a similar facility—perhaps the largest—inside Dreamland, behind the
base itself.

RCS facilities test how difficult it will be for new aircraft to be seen by radar.
Each major aerospace contractor has one. In such facilities, models of new
aircraft or missiles are set on pylons and test radars are beamed at them. Other
aircraft might fly overhead, testing their onboard radars. The tilted walls contain
and control the deployment of the radar waves. Engineers measure the way
aircraft reflect radar beams, how much and in what direction.

To protect against overflights by nosy satellites, some of the models can easily
be moved inside walls with sliding doors or have covers quickly placed over
them. Such is the most practical and banal explanation of the facilities. To those
less trusting, the RCS sites are openings to underground bases, portals to an
underworld of secret treaties and alien takeovers.

To the two leading underground theorists, Richard Sauder, author of the
aggressively titled tract Underground Bases and Tunnels—What Is the Government
Trying to Hide?, and William Hamilton, even Plant 42 in Palmdale had secret
floors beneath it. In his book Cosmic Top Secret and in the video Underground
Bases, Hamilton claims that the first saucer wreckage came to Area 51 in the late
forties and the first underground labs were built at that time. They have
expanded ever since. Hamilton describes baseball diamonds and swimming pools
that exist beneath the surface.

Hamilton is not alone in this conviction. Even such a fairly sober youfer as
Stanton Friedman was intrigued by the idea of levels beneath the runway. “I have
been informed that a secret underground base was built under the runway at
Groom Lake in the early 1950s, well before the U-2 program,” he wrote in an
Internet posting. “I expect to dig into this one soon.”

Hamilton is disarmingly nonfanatical. He could be lecturing a class on post-
Keynesian developments in macroeconomics when he discusses secret tunnels.
Hamilton cites sources describing a network of tunnels linking bases, a virtual
underground interstate system.

For proof, Hamilton and Sauder offer plans for underground command posts

and living quarters and diagrams of tunnel-boring machines from a 1959 RAND
report or via the Army Corps of Engineers, organizations that, at the height of the
Cold War, were ordered to figure out how to put practically everything
underground. The fallout shelter fad was about to begin. Living underground was
not considered far-fetched or sinister.

Underground is, of course, rich with metaphor, as the place of the unseen, the
realm of death, of organized crime, and of defiant resistance. The idea of the
underground base as hive or anthill is common—areas are “honeycombed” with
tunnels. In Them!, the classic fifties science-fiction film and a parable of the Red
menace, a little girl who has been terrified by giant ants (the offspring of
radiation) is examined by doctors and a scientist. When the scientist gives her a
sniff of formic acid, the poison from ant stings, she begins screaming
uncontrollably: “Them! Them! Them!”

Thinking of Them!, I drove west from Edwards toward the place known as the
Anthill, cleverly disguised as Northrop’s radar cross-section testing facility, west
of Willow Springs. From Trader I learned how to get there, driving past shopping
centers and the Willow Springs racetrack, bright with painted ads. The trip was a
wonderful excuse to go badassing along primitive roads in a 4-by-4, playing
rough road rock-and-roll. Once out of civilization, I followed a dirt road named,
perhaps ironically, Broken Arrow. Broken Arrow, of course, is the military code
name for an incident involving the loss or theft of a nuclear weapon.

Someone had painted a bright blue warning skull on the rock at the turnoff for
Broken Arrow Road, beneath the metal sign with its cincture of welded letters.
Broken Arrow was a western Mojave road as hard as the iron of the sign. Here
and there were ugly ruts and cracks where the road had dried and split open. At
other places, gray clay creeks appeared. At one turn, a false trail, I came to a
barbed-wire gate and a jackrabbit flattened on the road, in the pose of a leap, as
if captured in midair by a strobe flash.

At last the odometer showed I was close. I parked and scrambled up a hill.
Over the horizon I could see all there was to see: a couple of buildings, a radio
antenna or two, a water tower. No evidence of underground structures. No air
vents, no strange doors. All I saw were signs of new water management facilities
—canals and culverts. Nothing suspicious, although it was through the sewer
system that the ants in Them! had raced most dramatically. To the suspicious,
such innocent stuff was the whole point: The underground was a version of that
oldest of menaces, the unseen.

The underground can also be understood as the unconscious—the source of
dreams and psychoses. To those who believe in the underground bases, this
analogy is more specific. To them, physical levels are indications of levels of
information and security, and also perhaps of psychic levels: The deeper the
facility is dug, the deeper the conspiracy. If a vision of things below the surface

represented the “cover-up” in literal form, connections among them represented
the extent of hidden links. Tunnels, the theorists argued, tied the sites together—
sinister hidden connections made manifest. The accounts included stories of
workers who had ridden the rails from the beach in Los Angeles to Area 51, with
connections available to Los Alamos and Sandia. Were Amtrak so well run, it
would put the Japanese bullet train and the French TGV to shame.

Thus Area 51 connects with Edwards and Sandia and Los Alamos, and even
with the most terrifying of the projected underground facilities, Dulce, on the
Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. Level 4 is concerned with telepathy and dream
control. Level 6 or 7 holds the vats with the embryos of half-breed human-aliens
and other grotesque genetic experiments. It is known in the Lore as Nightmare
Hall.

The underground conspiracy buffs tend to equate security levels with physical
levels. Twenty-four or thirty-eight levels of underground installations correspond
to the same number of levels of “clearance.” But in the actual black world, it’s
not just a matter of higher or lower clearance from sensitive to secret to top
secret to “Q” but of separation on the same level: of different rooms on the same
floor. In reality, there is not only distinction among levels but distinction among
rooms, so to speak, at the same level.

In their descriptions, the Lorists seem especially concerned with doors. As if
they were film production designers, they describe in detail access panels, sliding
cards, retinal readers, weight-triggered access doors. Many door controllers or
speakers are in the shape of an inverted triangle. The inverted triangle is linked
in other parts of the tales to the trilateralists and, more implicitly, to the
existence of layers below the surface: It’s the inversion of the pyramid on the
dollar bill and the great seal of the United States.

The end of underground theories is to see the earth itself as hollow, to imagine
not just a hell beneath our feet but the world as a mere shell. In this ultimate
version of conspiracist theory, Nazis fly the saucers they have developed into the
center of the earth through hidden portals at the poles. “Commander X”—former
“Military Intelligence Operative” and author of Underground Alien Bases —has the
Nazis colonizing the center of the earth in cooperation with “Serpent People”
aliens. He believes that “in reality, many of the craft seen over Area 51 in Nevada
are not constructed by aliens. They are instead experimental vehicles derived
from the secret plans of German scientists, many of whom were brought to the
U.S. and given political asylum, even though they may have taken part in vicious
war crimes.” The Nazis perfected anti-gravity and time-warp transportation, X
also tells us, and landed on the moon before 1945.

Hollow-earth theories are as old as the Egyptians, of course, but as recently as
the nineteenth century they were taken with some seriousness in the United
States. The hollow-earthers populated the center of the earth with all the features
and creatures later theorists and science fiction would transfer to other planets.

Before there was an expectation of space travel, the interior of the planet was the
most distant region imaginable. So A Journey to the Center of the Earth would give
way to A Trip to the Moon.

In 1819, John Cleves Symmes propounded his theory that our hollow earth
contains five concentric lands. James McBride explained it all in the following
decade in The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, “demonstrating that the earth
is hollow, habitable and widely open about the poles.” One writer of the time
imagined the land inside as “a white land,” full of the whitest of humans. In the
1830s an odd character named Jeremiah Reynolds began promoting a South Pole
expedition to prove Symmes’s theory. Amazingly, he prevailed upon the U.S.
government to fund not one but two such expeditions. One result was the
production of very useful marine charts of the southern waters. Another was to
inspire Edgar Allan Poe to write such stories of possibly hollow worlds as “MS.
Found in a Bottle,” “Descent into the Maelstrom,” and The Narrative of A. Gordon
Pym.

To see the earth as hollow was ultimately a vision of profound despair. It
meant we literally could not trust the ground upon which we stood. It meant life
itself was empty. Edward Shils wrote of “the torment of secrecy,” the pain of
those who believed that all history took place behind a veil of some kind of
conspiracy, that the real motivational forces in the world are unseen, perhaps
undiscoverable. This is a hard philosophy to live with.

Helendale, in California, the largest of the RCS sites, is the newest such facility. It
is huge, with its own runway, near which Aurora was thought to have been
spotted. Its main radar area, called, sinisterly enough, the Upper Chamber, seems
to cover acres of concrete.

To reach it, I cut through from the highway that ran east of Edwards AFB, then
drove over the white sandy bed of the erstwhile Mojave River, past trailers and
little houses. I could see the distant hangar—Lockheed yellow—and turning up
the road, I came to the fence and gate that barred the way.

To the left of the gate, shoved up practically against that fence, there was a
place called Exotic World, a sort of museum celebrating burlesque culture, the
home of an old stripper who has collected the G-strings of the great strippers of
the past.

Months later, as I sat watching one of those offbeat local-color features TV
news loves so much, I thought I recognized a beat-up little trailer and nearby
fence. It was indeed Exotic World. There was a nice sound bite from the owner,
herself a former stripper: “Striptease was not invented,” she said, it just
happened, when someone caught a glimpse of a dancer pushed out onto the stage
too soon. “Striptease,” she said, “is a phenomenon, and phenomenons are not
made, they just happen.”

I thought of the Air Force general who declared that a secret aircraft should
reveal itself only gradually and seductively. Striptease was about imagination
more than revelation, and so were the RCS sites: Phenomena just happened there,
too. I wondered if a visit to Exotic World didn’t say more about the workings of
secret aircraft than standing on the concrete of Helendale’s Upper Chamber.

21. Space Aliens from the Pentag on and Other Conspiracies

On his way to the Oklahoma City federal building, the bomber Timothy McVeigh
slept in room 25 of a motel in Kansas named Dreamland. I took this information
as a token of just how closely the fascination with a New World Order, a new
political view of the world, was taking hold of the views of Dreamland.

The New World Order theorists had rapidly developed their own lore, decrying
the influences of the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA). Black helicopters and white (UN) personnel carriers were
making furtive appearances. They were UFOs of the militias. 1

On the Internet, the theorists reached such filigreed detail of conspiracy that
one story even claimed the NWO would abolish all but a single chain of fast-food
restaurants: Taco Bell. Believing this, who would not take up arms against the
menace?

NWO lore was overlapping UFO lore. On Long Island, in 1996, Ed Zabo, an
aerospace electrician, and John Ford, head of the Long Island UFO Network, were
charged with attempting to poison a county Republican chairman by slipping
radium into his food. Zabo, a government inspector at the local Northrop-
Grumman plant, believed that the county government was conspiring to cover up
evidence of UFO landings, which among other things had resulted in extensive
forest fires on Long Island the previous summer. The district attorney shook his
head and opined that “this all convinces me that there is a side to humanity that
defies definition.”

George Bush and the speechwriters who popularized the glib but murky phrase
“New World Order” to label the era that succeeded the Cold War could hardly
have imagined that it would come to denote so readily such a malignant
mythology. The phrase became a cipher, a placeholder, a linguistic Groom Lake
waiting to be filled with speculations. I took it as a sign of the end of the Cold
War, which left a yawning vacuum of uncertainty. We missed the Cold War. And I
regarded the NWO’s most fervent adherents as victims of a kind of post-traumatic
stress disorder. It’s not easy to take away an enemy you’ve lived with for nearly
half a century. How much easier to deal with an invented enemy than with none
at all; how important to the conspiracist for the world to possess an order, even if
that order is dark and hidden.

The Interceptor known as the Minister of Words believed that the appeal of this
dark mythology was a sign of economic distress. “The uneducated shitkicker class
in this country is dead,” he argued. However prosperous America seemed in the
nineties, life had gotten tougher for the guy with a trailer and a pickup truck.

But some of the early believers in the UFO cover-up were converting to a still
darker view: that an even more sinister conspiracy was behind the use of flying
saucers in order to drive us into the arms of the New World Order.

In the summer of 1996, I visited the national convention of MUFON, the Mutual
UFO Network. It was held at a North Carolina Holiday Inn, with the same tone of
seriousness and self-fascination as a regional gathering of insurance salesmen or
plumbing supply vendors. I noticed that no one smiled.

In one room, on acres of tables, every stripe of UFO thinking was laid out in
books and videos. I felt compelled to browse something called From Elsewhere:
Being E. T. in America, about the experiences of a man who felt he was an alien on
Earth. You could also buy mugs and T-shirts and glow-in-the-dark alien
sculptures. But my eye was caught by the cover of a book that pictured a strange
pentagon and star device and the title Space Aliens from the Pentagon. It bore the
subtitle “Flying Saucers are Man-made Electrical Machines. Revised and
expanded Second Edition Creatopia Productions™, by William R. Lyne.” Cover
lines: “Does the CIA write Movie and TV scripts about ‘aliens’? Have you been
brainwashed: Does the CIA control Hollywood and TV? Did you know the flying
saucer is the best-kept energy secret on earth?” The cover art showed the
Pentagon as a maze. Inside it was set a swastika and an all-seeing eye, like that
on the seal of the United States or a Jungian eyeball in the sky.

Lyne argues that the saucers were faked by the Pentagon or some secret group
beyond and behind the Pentagon. He writes that “my ‘space aliens’ are actually
people, whose philosophy and bizarre masquerade are alien to the American way
of life, since they believe in government by anti-democratic hoax, to maintain the
secret power of the Trilateral Commission elite, to whom our lives are very
cheap. I am striking back against an ‘alien system’ which has attached itself to
the nation which our ancestors strove to create, which would be invulnerable to
the ‘aliens’ ... I have concluded that a Secret Government has watched me,
attempted to control me ...”

Lyne turns the Cosmic Watergate on its head. Far from being a cover-up, he
asserts, the saucer stories were all a put-on—a Hollywood production to frighten
us into the arms of the NWO, to create Reagan’s unifying alien threat. The
saucers came not from other galaxies but from Earth. The Nazis had taken the
technology of Tesla and developed flying saucers, which they used to fly to exile
in South America—perhaps even Antarctica. Werner von Braun flew the flying
saucers out of White Sands after the war. Hitler escaped from his bunker to South
America and visited San Antonio, Texas, in 1967 as a guest of LBJ. But when
Lyne—and he alone apparently—recognized Hitler and Eva Braun, they were
quickly hustled away.

Lyne was always a key player in the dramas he described. He told how he had
quarreled with Sargent Shriver over his dismissal from the Peace Corps and how

in 1975 George Bush had offered him a high position with the CIA, which he
rejected.

Lyne’s biography states that he saw his first UFO as a child in Kermit, Texas.
He received an MFA in “studio arts” from Sam Houston State University; he
certainly had artistic talent. His book is illustrated with obsessive and skillful
drawings, part engineering diagram, part R. Crumb.

He believed the National Security Act of 1947, dividing the armed services,
was treasonous, and that the Roswell incident was a hoax. The “aliens” were
dead monkeys from the rocket tests at White Sands, crudely disguised. He had
seen photos of them, but they were stolen by a former girlfriend. He produced
drawings from memory, in his skillful but jittery style.

He rolled all the myths together, all the government cover-ups into one all-
consuming conspiracy. Hitler escapes, and strange artifacts float around in the
hands of old Indians in the Southwest. No topic was too large to bring into his
web—Lyne delivers a long excoriation of “Platonist epistemology”—and none
was too small—the powers in Detroit conspiring to squash the small, inexpensive
Crosley automobile of the late forties. 2

While the account in Space Aliens from the Pentagon possesses a singular
viewpoint—all the information had somehow come to Lyne and Lyne alone—
another perspective on Dreamland employs a dizzying collage of clippings and
reports.

In two videotapes entitled Secrets of Dreamland, a man named Norio Hayakawa,
who had led the Japanese TV crew to Bob Lazar, had produced a carefully, not to
say obsessively, documented depiction of a vast conspiracy swirling about
Dreamland like a dust devil.

The tapes are made up mostly of footage of a lecture Hayakawa had given to a
religious group called the Prophecy Network. He makes token gestures to an
apocalyptic sort of Christianity—probably for the benefit of the audience, whose
favorite book of the Bible is the infinitely interpretable Revelation. The lecture is
generously illustrated with clips about exotic military programs for mind control,
electromagnetic warfare, lasers, and exotic aircraft from such sources as The
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Aviation Week. The lecture is
followed by home-video footage of flying saucers along Mailbox Road: lights
jumping in the sky and turning on the proverbial dime.

UFOs, Hayakawa concludes, are part of a created threat designed to stampede
the populace into accepting the New World Order. He reports, “Dreamland is
said”—that passive tense again—“to be an acronym for Data Repository
Establishment and Management Land. It will be the center for a future satellite
linkage system that will centralize all global computer data network systems.

“A device known as Battle Engagement Area Simulator and Tracker

(B.E.A.S.T.), developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and [to] be
launched into orbit under the auspices of DARPA, will link all global data
network systems in the air.

“The Beast”—yes, the noted Beast of Revelation—“will be some type of a
super-computer linking station launched into orbit in a few more years. It may
link stations emitting hologramic images into the atmosphere to control the
‘thinking’ patterns of the populace.”

In the hours I had spent watching Hayakawa’s Secrets of Dreamland videotapes I
had noted his shift toward the conspiratorial. There were two tapes, released a
couple of years apart, and between them was a subtle change in emphasis,
extended even to the packaging, and an apparent shift in his target audience from
the youfers to a New World Order conspiracy audience. It was not only good
marketing, reflecting a changing world, but indicated a change in Norio’s
thinking. He believed that the Rockefeller Foundation in North America and the
Rothschild financial conglomerate in Europe are an integral part of the entity
known as the Bilderbergers, which plans to establish the New World Order by the
year 2002.

“The Lord,” Hayakawa announces, “is literally coming to catch his believers in
the air. A mass confusion will take over the world.” I wondered at that moment
whether he had ever heard the Louvin Brothers’ song “The Great Atomic Power,”
in which the victims of the A-bomb rise to meet their savior in the air.

His argument draws equally from scripture and Aviation Week and goes like
this:

The New World Order, a secret government, is using UFOs to frighten us into
accepting their tyranny. Strange new technologies are controlling us, including
holographic projection and other forms of mind control.

“It is my opinion,” Hayakawa insists, “that an elite group of globalists has
always believed that the ultimate way to create some type of global unity was to
create an artificial threat from elsewhere. It could be war, disasters, worldwide
calamity, et cetera, to create an artificial ‘crisis.’ But the ultimate one is to create
an external threat from ‘outside,’ and the most convincing one will be an ‘alien’
threat from beyond earth.

“To this end,” he intones, “I believe that we have slowly been brainwashed and
manipulated to believe in the existence of ‘extraterrestrial’ entities. Look at the
proliferation of ‘alien’-related films and TV documentaries and
semidocumentaries. I think that this is all a part of the conditioning process that
is preparing us psychologically to accept the ‘alien’ presence and sensitize us to
the ‘alien threat’ in the very near future.”

He talks of devices to control minds, some of which may cause temporary
memory loss. Certain chemicals are used, and equipment. There is reference to a

Dr. Igor Smirnoff—very much his real name—who developed an acoustic device
for mind control. Work is going on at Wright Patterson Air Force Base to create
brain-actuated airplane controls.

Hayakawa delves into some Joseph Campbell-like interpretations as well. The
legendary Majic or MJ-12 from UFO lore is traced to symbolic code words, an
occult term from ancient days, linked to magi, or wise men.

The secret government is sensitizing us, he says, preparing us for the takeover.
The clips from the popular press prove this. “When The Washington Post says so, it
is already done.”

Hayakawa narrates the video clips of his saucer-chasing expeditions that follow
his lecture, like an appendix in a book, in a very different voice. “The intensity of
sound stunned us,” he says breathlessly in one. “You could physically feel the
noise from eighteen miles away.” There are shots from Freedom Ridge, a bouncy,
smeary view of the base at night, and a red glow. Is it a plane? “It might just be a
car,” says a voice on the sound track. “No,” another voice, overflowing with
excitement, counters. “That’s a ship. See, there are trucks around it?... They’re
getting ready to send it up.”

Because of these videotapes, I ended up one August day in Los Angeles’s Little
Tokyo. I stepped from the heat into the cool dark lobby of a Japanese American
funeral home. It stood near a toy warehouse in an area not so much ethnically
colorful as ethnically triumphant: architecture as slick and corporate as Tokyo’s,
a Buddhist temple in its own little park, a series of looming brutalist apartment
buildings with mall. At one edge of Little Tokyo stood a replica of a building
from the internment camps, a tattered barrackslike building that might have been
pulled from the wreckage of an abandoned training base—the old Tonopah, say,
or Indian Springs.

I waited in front of a sign that read slumber room viewing. A sweet odor filled the
air, and somber Japanese Muzak drifted by. Then a friendly man emerged: Norio
Hayakawa, UFO buff, Area 51 researcher, and full-time funeral director.

I had e-mailed Hayakawa, asking to talk to him, and he agreed. He delicately
warned me not to mention UFOs if I called him at the funeral home. “You know
how it goes,” he said, in the tired phrase of many saucer buffs trying to get by in
the more mundane world.

I wanted to hear how Hayakawa would tie Dreamland into the Book of
Revelation, a dangerously heady elixir for preachers and prophets of many
shades.

It turned out to be a little more complicated: Hayakawa went easy on the
specific biblical references, hailing a more general “spirituality” that, along with
the unification of the various militias, he sees as our best hope of salvation.

After the teeming conspiracy tales of the tape, I hardly knew what to expect of
Hayakawa in person. He was gracious, friendly, disarming. We drove to a
restaurant on the edge of Little Tokyo. He was honored by my visit and interest,
he told me, but he seemed weary, tired of it all.

“My main thesis,” he pronounced, almost as if by rote, “is that highly
developed technology could be utilized to stage a fake alien invasion to
desensitize us to intrusive authority and shocking revelations.

“I think it’s always going to be a mystery. It will never be solved. Or by the
time we find out what is there, it will be too late. We won’t find out until all hell
breaks loose.”

In his lecture, Hayakawa points out that the year 1947 was when all these
strange things began to happen: the founding of the Air Force and the CIA, the
Roswell crash. He does not mention the death of Bugsy Siegel and the bankruptcy
of the Flamingo, the transistor or the Truman Doctrine or Yeager’s first flight
through the sound barrier. When I asked, he explained that he traced his own
fascination with what he called “the UFO phenomenon” back to that year,
perhaps because in 1947 his father, a fisherman, looked up from his boat off the
coast of Japan and saw a strange light in the sky.

Hayakawa graduated from high school in Yokohama, and joined Japanese UFO
groups in 1963. He attended college in New Mexico and made contact with other
UFO watchers in the state. By 1976 he was teaching at a school in suburban
Phoenix. In 1988 he watched with fascination when the Fox network, already
working its reputation as the tabloid of TV, broadcast the show UFO Cover-up?
Live! It was the first time Hayakawa heard the term “Area 51.”

Nearly a year later, he heard Bob Lazar speak on the Billy Goodman radio
show. Hayakawa had long served as a kind of UFO scout or consultant for Nippon
TV in Japan, and he let them know about Lazar. In February, NTV sent a
correspondent and crew to Las Vegas with Hayakawa.

“Lazar showed us the documents concerning his work,” he explained. “Later we
found out that his Social Security number”—on the famed W-2 that showed Lazar
being paid $977.11 by Naval Intelligence—“belongs to a person in New York.”

On Lazar’s advice, Hayakawa and the crew headed up to Mailbox Road to look
for saucers. “We were looking toward S-4, over the Jumbled Hills, when this
strange light came up, went up and down. It was one of the most amazing things
I’ve experienced.”

Hayakawa’s video shows jumpy images of lights. You can hear the hissing,
flickering sound the desert wind makes in the microphones, threatening to
obscure the signal.

Hayakawa made many trips back to Mailbox Road, sometimes with Gary
Schultz. He had seen the saucers, he thought, and on his tapes there are many

lights moving erratically in the sky. He also believed he had seen UAVs flying up
there. But he had also come to wonder if some of the things flying had not been
illusory images, projected somehow, perhaps holographically—high-tech
illusions.

Today, Hayakawa says, “mystification” has taken over Area 51. He sees
patterns and connections everywhere; he links the Beast computer to the Book of
Revelation. He is fascinated by numbers. Did I realize, he asked, that 1998 was a
critical year, 666 times three? Something big would happen. Is it all part of the
symbolism for a diabolical trinity? he wonders.

He believes that Lazar’s claims are so far beyond any verification that he feels
he has been a tool of disinformation—and quite likely mind control. “I believe he
was used unwittingly to spread disinformation.”

“High strangeness,” he said, as if in conclusion, “high strangeness.” He sounded
as if he felt betrayed. I sensed he was a bit weary of the contention, even weary
of his own theories. He was, I felt, the outsider par excellence, as alienated as
only a Japanese American running a funeral home could be.

At the end of our conversation, country-and-western music somehow came up.
Hayakawa finally came alive. He brightened all over. It was amazing to see him
finally smile. He was wild about country-and-western music, he said. He had a
portable keyboard system, which he had brought with him and played at the
Little A“Le”Inn. I suspected that he wanted above all to be a real American.

I felt a wave of affection for Norio Hayakawa, sympathy for his fragmented
roles, for his disappointment in Lazar. He had in a sense been left at the altar by
the UFO world, embarrassed by Gary Schultz, stood up at the airport by Bob
Lazar.

On the label of his video Secrets of Dreamland 2, Hayakawa is referred to as a
“phenomecologist [sic] and researcher.” A typo (so frequent in UFO material) or
an effort at new coinage? Perhaps an attempt to combine phenomenologist and
ecologist—“the ecology of phenomenon.” The very phrase teemed with
possibilities. I thought of a course of university study I had recently heard of
called “media ecology.” In a sense, Hayakawa’s work was a mad gloss on the
media. All his clippings about secret mind control programs, implanted chips,
holographic projections, and the like were perfectly documentable in journals
describing the frontiers of research. But that word “phenomecologist” also
suggested “pharmacologist.” Was conspiracy thinking a drug prescribed for
existential ills, an antidote for alienation, the way Hayakawa’s music was?

Later, he sent me his demonstration tape. Its cover showed him in front of a
pickup truck in the middle of the desert—a classic C&W shot. In the desert, I
thought, everyone is a country star, everyone is an American—and everyone is an
alien.

His songs were classics—“Branded Man,” “Why Me, Lord?,” “I’ll Fly Away.” I
would never have expected to hear anything, however, like Norio Hay aka wa
singing “Sensuous Woman.” I had forgotten to ask him if he had ever heard “The
Great Atomic Power,” but I somehow felt he lived in the apocalyptic spirit of that
song.

Hayakawa’s tape became a key part of my personal sound track for the desert.
With ZZ Top’s version of “Viva Las Vegas,” it was instrumental in keeping me
awake on the long drives around the perimeter of Dreamland.

After I talked to Hayakawa, I headed up the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
The link between the two cities, it always struck me, was like that between the
cartoon sleeper and the dream bubble above his head. Vegas was L.A. distillate, a
step further into fantasy than even Hollywood would go. I was following in the
footsteps of men who had bigger ideas than L.A. could grasp, men like Bugsy
Siegel, the inventor of Las Vegas.

The way rocking in a boat all day means that when you close your eyes at
night on land you will feel waves, immersion in Norio Hayakawa’s thinking left
me seeing links everywhere. I donned his worldview like a pair of polarizing
sunglasses. I listened to the radio news with suspicion. I noticed a weird
symmetry in the way the sun was going down and the moon rising—the two
circles the same height, the same size. Why?

It struck me, trying to go with his flow, that Hayakawa was a Jungian—he saw
just as many archetypal meanings in the world. His was a world teeming with
meanings—too full of meanings, perhaps. Conspiratorial, “mystified” meanings.
“Mystified” was what he had said about Dreamland—“they’ve mystified it”—and
now they were using our fascination with it to delude us.

A little later in the day, when a song by Willie Nelson came on, a verse stuck in
my mind, a warning that sometimes your dreams can begin dreaming you.

Norio Hayakawa, an admitted “conspiratorologist,” seemed resigned to living in
the world such a role created. This meant that he encountered Dreamland
everywhere he looked. In return for understanding the secret order, he had to
accept the impossibility of escaping that order—it grew to take dominion
everywhere. “The place has no edges.” Hadn’t the Minister warned us?

Pulling in for gas at a truck stop in Barstow, I came across the Area 51 video
game. It was a big hit in the arcades, I learned, and I kept running across it in
diner lobbies, in mall arcades, outside movie theaters. 3

The game’s opening screen summed up perfectly the new pop mystique the
phrase “Area 51” had taken on: “Area” in military crate stencils, “51” in big
bank-vault metallic letters and numbers, dented with bullets. This was the vague
popular understanding of the mythical, imagined “Area 51”—the aliens have
literally possessed military bodies. “The fate of humanity hangs in the balance,”

the instructions explain, at the same time promising a “detailed re-creation of the
most secretive airbase in the world.” If you read the fine print, you learn that
“Area 51” had been trademarked.

The premise of the game is that a saucer, or other craft, has been recovered
and its occupants have taken over the base. The player must get inside as part of
a special SWAT team and battle “alien-infected personnel,” a handy means of
conflating evil, nonhuman expendable aliens with traditional images of bad guys
wearing berets and overalls—the type that die by the dozens in Hollywood action
films. Boxes and barrels surround the place; there are hot fighters and tough
humvees scattered about. A panel truck bears the designing firm’s name, Mesa
Logic.

The premise will come as no surprise: Shoot ’em fast as you can as they pop
out from behind boxes and vehicles or dash along catwalks. Hangars make fine
settings for shoot-outs. The ultimate goal of the game is to “penetrate” far enough
to set off a special nuclear destruction device and rid the planet of the invading
scourge. I couldn’t help noticing, a little wistfully, that winning the Area 51 game
meant destroying Area 51. But when I played, I never managed to get very far
inside the perimeter before running out of ammo and lives.

With Tom Mahood’s detailed time line of Lazar’s life in hand, I drove around Las
Vegas on my own personal Lazar tour. I passed the welcome to fabulous las vegas sign
that marked the beginning of the Strip. I wanted to get a sense of the place where
Lazar was said to have “pandered”—the Newport Cove Apartments, site of an
alleged brothel. A few blocks off the Strip, I found them: a complex with thick
pseudo-adobe walls and the wavy red tile that was supposed to signal Spanish
style but looked instead like giant clay lasagna. This was not a dump or a cheap
hotel but a fairly high-class if anonymous set of apartments, welcome home! a sign
shouted.

I passed the familiar Glass Pool Motel, one of my favorite places in Vegas, even
though it represented a minor gimmick for the Strip, which was in its fetal stages
here on the edge of town as if foreshadowing for drivers entering the city the
fountains and swim-up bars that lay ahead. But I took it as an early, touching bit
of entrepreneurial show business: The pool was raised above ground and fitted
with portholes so you could glance in at the swimmers. It reminded me of old-
style aquariums, where you could see porpoises through portholes, then go
upstairs to watch them leap. I liked it because it still had an amateurish quality to
its showbiz, although now the water looked none too blue, murky and uninviting.

I stopped by Lazar’s old house, where his first wife had committed suicide. It
was empty now. It stood on a nice, quiet street, exactly the kind TV reporters
flock to when someone is hauled away on a stretcher, the neighbors telling them
that they would never have dreamed of it in a thousand years. The concept “safe
house” leaped to mind.

I headed back east past the Janet terminal and came to the edge of the Hughes
Industrial Park on the other side of McCarran Airport. This was Dreamland’s
navel, as it were, the umbilicus connecting it to the real world. The contractors
who served Dreamland were clustered here on the map that would double as an
organizational chart. There, in neat, slick glass boxes of low buildings, like stereo
components arranged in a store, were Wackenhut and SAIC, in the same building
as Bechtel. Lockheed sat on its own little loop—Kelly Johnson Drive!—across
from EG&G Special Projects.

A gardener was working around the sign proclaiming eg&g special projects. That
word special again, as in special forces, special weapons, special operations.
Having run most of the Nevada Test Site’s operations, directly or through its
REECO subsidiary, having hired guards and owned aircraft, and now operating
most of Dreamland, EG&G had come a long way from the labs at MIT where
Harold Edgerton had started out.

The man who had invented stroboscopic photography was great PR and beloved
at MIT. Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s images of bullets passing through apples, and
footballs indented by the toe of a kicker, turned technology into showbiz. They
reached a wide public, the Life magazine sort of audience, and showed science
not as equations or test tubes but as something fun and exciting and amazing.
MIT president James Killian, who had headed the commission that recommended
building the U-2, would coauthor a book with Edgerton on his photographs.

Edgerton’s photos also represented a turning point in the way twentieth-
century man saw the world. In his standard History of Photography, Beaumont
Newhall writes that strobe photography had “gone beyond seeing ... and brings
us a world of form normally invisible,” which fixes “forever form never detected
by the unaided eye.” It revealed what art critic Rosalind Krauss would later call
“the visual unconscious.”

Edgerton’s photographs captured the dreams of everyday vision, the moments
that slept beneath the waking level of ordinary sight: frozen bubbles and bullets,
and the magical crown created by the splash of a drop in a pail of milk.

Born in 1903, Edgerton spent most of his childhood in Aurora, Nebraska, a
science-fair whiz kid. In the late twenties he experimented with argon lamps and
developed the stroboscopic method of photography, a bright, extremely short
flash of light in sync with the camera shutter.

He was fascinated with aviation, having seen the Wrights fly at Fort Myers,
Virginia, in 1909; during World War II, reconnaissance aircraft were equipped
with his strobes. Edgerton’s flash illuminated crossroads and town squares in
Normandy the night before D-day, documenting the placement of German troops.

By the thirties it was clear there was too much money to be made with the
strobe not to commercialize it. With his key associates, Herbert Grier and

Kenneth Germeshausen, Edgerton established a company to commercialize the
equipment for industrial clients. Strobe photographs could reveal the inner
workings of machines, and, adapted, strobes would pace the party of the sixties—
their dreamy lighting inducing reveries while dancing to rock and roll—and
sometimes trigger epileptic fits. The strobes later went underwater with Jacques
Cousteau and discovered the wrecks of the Titanic and the Monitor. But their most
important use would be in capturing the milliseconds of an atomic explosion,
tracking the fireball out from its plutonium kernel, so that Life magazine could
reveal the unfolding of the nuclear blooms that obsessed its readers.

Edgerton’s cameras were at Eniwetok Atoll in 1946 and, a few years later, at
the new Nevada Proving Ground, set up on a seventy-five-foot tower seven miles
from ground zero. There, they captured the nuclear explosion in the moment it
hung like a leukocyte, a terrifying organism blown from micro to macro size.

It soon became clear that triggering a camera to take a picture of an atomic
blast was very much like triggering the blast itself, and EG&G became one of the
AEC’s chief contractors. EG&G didn’t just photograph the bombs, it helped to
explode them. It produced thyratrons, krytrons, and other detonators. And soon
EG&G was running all sorts of things at the test site, such as the building and
operation of the blast doors in underground tunnels, which would close in a
millisecond.

For the DOE, EG&G developed special bacteria to remove radioactive
components from the soil, and it grew top-grade mercuric iodide crystals on
space shuttle flights in 1985 and 1992 to serve as the heart of new types of
extremely sensitive radioactivity detectors. As the Cold War wound down, EG&G
began to look to civilian work. In 1993 it obtained a new contract to manage the
space shuttle launch and landing complexes for NASA, a task that, according to
the company’s annual report, required a “200-man uniformed security force and
SWAT team.” It also ran facilities for separating tritium—the heavy isotope of
hydrogen used in nuclear weapons—from helium. It had branches in Langley,
Virginia, in Florida, and in West Virginia.

The company’s 1995 annual report listed some $1.4 billion in sales and touted
the company’s work in sensors for air-bag deployment and other automotive uses,
its “Z-scan” airport security system, and other work. There was a terse mention of
“continuing assignments for U.S. Customs” and a contract “from a U.S. federal
agency to conduct a classified project.” However, there was no mention of the
Janet airline, or of Groom Lake, or of the decision to let the contract to run the
Nevada Test Site go to Bechtel. And there was no picture of the building that
houses “EG&G Special Projects.”

22. Searchlight

We were heading for the center of the world. In a rented Hyundai Sonata, Trader
and his friend and I were driving east from Las Vegas, then south toward
Searchlight, Nevada. Trader had read that the Mojave Indians believed a certain
mountain called Avikwame was the center of the universe. Based on description
and hand-drawn maps, Trader said that Avikwame appeared to be Spirit
Mountain, part of the Newberry Range near Searchlight. Trader brought a friend,
a journalist who had once accompanied one of Gary Schultz’s secret saucer base
expeditions to the perimeter of Dreamland.

The town’s name suggested a government special-access or black program. I
thought of Black Light, the name of one such mysterious program, and Redlight,
the alleged secret saucer program inside Dreamland. And the UFO group CSETI
(Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) called its program for
tracking sightings Spotlight.

Trader tracked the black budget that financed secret aircraft projects. By
interpreting the budget’s secret codes and mysterious symbols, he had audited
the books of Dreamland. He’d followed the money.

Trader was red-haired, tall, not what I’d imagined—he had been for me a
stealthy character behind an e-mail name for so long. His real name was Paul
McGinnis, and he spent his working hours creating and debugging software for a
firm in Irvine—that glittery futuristic planned city packed with aerospace and
high-tech firms. He was a “Code Warrior.”

It was not by accident that he was also fascinated with mythological
symbolism, odd rituals, and the bizarre corners of culture. His extensive home
page furnished links to pages on Finnish epics, Betty Page pinups, tattoo art, and
voudoun, or voodoo. The site was illustrated with a strange crosslike shape, and
Trader explained to me that it was a “vever,” a voudoun symbol of the crossroads
that was believed to open the gates to other dimensions.

In the budget, Trader looked for the confluences and crossings of information
that opened up an understanding of what was actually going on, a search for
little vevers in the bureaucracy. In a sense, all Dreamland was a kind of vever, an
opening to the black world, linking reality and imagination. You could see the
black budget as a kind of hoodoo book of conjure spells, a set of computer viruses
in bureaucratic codes—a pattern somewhere between hex and hexadecimal.

He could read along in Aviation Week, say, about the specifications of a new
airplane, about performance envelopes and flyaway costs, and then all of a
sudden the bottom would drop out with a sentence like “The other projects,

however, remain firmly concealed in the black world.” It was as if you had sailed
to the edge of the pre-Columbian map and gotten the message “Here there be
dragons.”

The black world—and Dreamland itself—was like what computer experts call a
black box. A black box refers to circuits or program codes whose functions are
known but whose internal structure is not. The internal mechanics do not matter
to a designer who uses a black box to obtain that function. Dealing with a black
box was a form of reverse engineering, and decoding.

For Trader, it was all about breaking the code, trying to comprehend the inputs
and outputs of the black box. It had gradually dawned on me, too, that many
people who bought into conspiracy theories, especially those that neatly tied
everything together, were engineers or computer programmers, people who
worked in worlds where things connected, affected each other, had problems that
could be solved. They wanted the rest of the world to work that way—indeed,
saw the world as behaving that way. They wanted to find the code and debug it.

Trader did for a hobby what intelligence analysts did for a living. He made
himself into a collector, interpreter, collator, and on-line publicizer of the black
budget and its associated “special-access programs,” with code names like Senior
Trend and Tractor Bat and Have Donut. 1

The black budget is the government’s classified accounting of the amounts it
spends on activities it doesn’t want to make public: secret military research and
weapons programs, intelligence gathering, and covert operations. It admits of no
easy calculation, but Trader guessed it might be as high as $40 billion a year—a
figure larger than federal spending on education or health care. Looked at in
simpler terms, the government was spending $100 million a day on black work.

He explained that the black budget is documented in funding requests and
authorizations voted on by select congressional committees, and published with
omitted amounts and blacked-out passages. It hides all sorts of strange projects,
not just from enemies foreign and domestic but from the public and their elected
officials as well. The Pentagon’s black budget is actually composed of two
budgets, a Procurement budget and a Research, Development, Test, and
Evaluation budget, the tab for the toy testers. There are other black budgets, too,
covering defense intelligence and research. The reorganization of intelligence
gathering has given us exotic and almost unknown organs such as the Central
Imagery Office (CIO) and the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO).
An internal Pentagon memo from August 1994 that was accidentally released and
showed up in Jane’s Defense Weekly revealed numbers for some of them: The
National Security Agency spends $3.5 billion a year, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, $621 million, and the Central Imagery Office, $122 million for spy
satellite work.

Trader collects such government documents as the House and Senate versions

of the “National Defense Authorization Acts,” scrutinizing both the reports and
the supporting testimony to Congress. He spends hours consulting the Pentagon’s
own guides to reading the budget—Department of Defense Handbook DoD
7045.7-H—and with publications like “FYDP Program Structure,” Department of
the Air Force document “Supporting Data for Fiscal Year 1994—Budget Estimate
Submission—Descriptive Summaries—Research, Development, Test, and
Evaluation.”

These are not exactly light reading, and the plots are slow. Trader soon learned
that the black budget was a tissue of truths, half-truths, and quite likely outright
untruths, a fabric of disinformation as much as information. Huge items can be
hidden by breaking them up into smaller items, mislabeling, or simply omitting
them.

Even the names and responsibilities of the agencies involved are often hidden.
The National Reconnaissance Office, in charge of spy satellites, was so secret that
until a few years ago its very name could not legally be spoken. The “Virginia
Procurement Office” is really the CIA, and the “Maryland Procurement Office” is
the National Security Agency. And beyond programs marked merely secret are
budget items tagged with the wonderful euphemisms “selected activities” and
“special access.”

Through the Freedom of Information Act, Trader managed to get such juicy
documents as the RAND corporation’s “Route Planning Issues for Low Observable
Aircraft and Cruise Missiles,” a manual about the rules for the China Lake
airspace. There was also one, he was sure, for the Dreamland airspace itself,
R4808N. He had security manuals from the Nevada Test Site that revealed you
had to have an “8” on your badge to get into Area 51.

Trader had strong political convictions, to be sure—he supplies politicians
advocating reform with inside information. But more than anything, I got the
sense he was taken with the joy of the hunt, the thrill of the puzzle.

The black budget is the tip of a huge iceberg of secret government records that
date back to World War I. Well, not really an iceberg, perhaps, but a glacier of
classification, increasingly exposed as the Cold War thawed out the files. The list
of odd numbers and funny words that is the budget stands for something more:
the true information that belongs to the American taxpayer.

The black budget had its origins in top-secret World War II research like the
Manhattan Project. It took on added strength in 1958 in the wake of Sputnik, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the use of CIA “reserve funds”
for the U-2, the Blackbirds, and other programs. It was the slush fund for Ike’s
famed military-industrial complex.

Even after the standoff with the former Soviet Union ended, the black budget
remained huge. One reason is the Gulf War, which lent high-tech weapons

enhanced prestige and strengthened a vision of video-game war in which few
human beings—at least on our side—are actually killed or wounded and where
information gathering is vital. We fell even more deeply in love with high-tech
“silver bullet” weapons.

In a strange way, the cuts in the overall defense budget led to a new emphasis
on the sort of weapons for which the black budget is best known. Smart bombs
are cheaper than stealth bombers, the argument goes. The black budget may even
have increased as a percentage of the overall national budget. By the mid-nineties
we were still spending perhaps $20 billion on secret weapons research programs.
Some of those programs involved the planes flying out of Dreamland, some were
satellites, some were exotic energy weapons. Work continues on mounting anti¬
missile lasers in Boeing 747s. “You know,” Trader said, “Star Wars never really
went away.”

At work a proud “Code Warrior,” Trader would spend long nights trying to
decipher code, going through the mind-numbing documents in which the black
budget is laid out. He had discovered the black budget because he was a black-
airplane buff. Specifically, he became fascinated by Aurora. What distinguished
Trader from other Aurora watchers is that he began filing Freedom of
Information Act requests about programs whose names suggested they might be
aircraft. (Black-budget watchers know that “Senior” is the designation for the Air
Force’s advanced R&D projects—Stealth was Senior Trend, for instance.) In
September 1993, he filed Freedom of Information Act requests for information on
what he thought was Aurora—Senior Citizen (Program Element 0401316F)—and
on Groom Lake.

Trader found himself exchanging letters with an Air Force colonel named
Richard Weaver, then the secretary of the Air Force’s deputy for security and
investigative programs, and later the author of the report tying the Roswell
incident to the Project Mogul balloon.

What really set Trader off was doing an FOIA on the FOIAs he had previously
filed: He wanted to understand the process and why his requests had brought
back very little real information. Reading his own censored case files, he grew
angry. “I became convinced,” he told me dryly, “that the Air Force, and other
military services, had large numbers of senior officials who held arrogant
attitudes towards the average American taxpayer.”

In the files were memos from Colonel Weaver recommending rejection of
Trader’s requests, including such lines as “His appeal ‘justification’ is the standard
[blacked-out censored area] provided by almost everyone else who makes similar
requests for this information. All have been turned down. His rationale that he
somehow should be allowed to perform those oversight functions of Congress,
while novel, is not compelling.”

This response turned a mild-mannered inquirer into a muckraker. “I was

merely pointing out the Air Force’s violations of U.S. classification policy,
contained in Executive Order 12356, and how secret spending violated Article I,
Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.” He referred to the requirement that
Congress approve all federal spending. The black budget, Trader and others
argue, violates that provision by hiding the purpose of the expenditures.

He took further inspiration from a book called Blank Check, by reporter Tim
Weiner, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his expose of blackbudget programs for
The Philadelphia Inquirer. Weiner called the black budget “a culture of deception.”
It is, he wrote, a closed world built on the familiar cozy relationship between
Pentagon officials, the military brass, and defense contractors. The result was
waste. Weiner had investigated cost overruns and performance failures of
programs such as Milstar, the military communications and control satellite. He
wrote that it was all about preserving empires, that keeping programs secret is an
expression of institutional power, part of the still-closed world of the military and
its contractors.

But Trader wanted to go further: into the projects whose very existence was
hidden. He began assembling his own black budget, using congressional and DOD
documents. It was like reconstructing a crashed airplane or assembling a dinosaur
skeleton, with conjectural plaster pieces filling in the missing gaps. He set up an
Internet site to distribute his files.

Trader, like most critics of the black budget, argued that for all the triumphs of
the Skunk Works, most secret programs hid waste. Revealing the cost of a Stealth
fighter tells no more about how to build one than the cost of a Cadillac does.
Many black programs, such as the B-2 Stealth bomber and the Milstar satellite
system, ended up costing far more than planned, but by the time the public
learned of the cost overruns it was too late to kill the programs. So much money
had been spent that proponents successfully argued that ending the programs
would be a bigger waste.

The B-2 was too big to hide. If the Skunk Works provided stories of how black
programs could provide stunning success, the B-2 was the prime public example
of the disasters secrecy could produce. I caught my first glimpse of a B-2 bomber
one day as I drove past the chain-link at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. It was
twilight, and far across the open ground I saw a gray blobbish whale shape,
derived in part from what Northrop had learned by flying Shamu. It was the
primary example of a black program gone awry. With an undefined mission and
an unproven need, pushed by the great momentum of airpower advocacy, its cost
ballooned to over a billion dollars a copy, Tim Weiner had calculated, three times
the worth of its weight in gold. “It just got away from them,” Ben Rich told me,
referring sympathetically to his traditional rival Northrop.

The B-2 compounded the cults of airpower and of stealth with a third, the
flying wing. In January 1981, a frail, ill eighty-five-year-old man walked into a
room at the Northrop offices on Century Boulevard in Los Angeles. Senior

officials and engineers welcomed Jack Northrop. From a box they pulled a model
of the Stealth bomber. To Jack Northrop, it was instantly recognizable as the heir
to the flying wing bombers he had designed in the 1940s. “Now I know why God
has kept me alive these last twenty-five years,” he said tearfully. Standing beside
him were Steve Smith and John Cashen, who had helped create Shamu.

The flying wing had always enjoyed a mystical, almost fanatic following from
those who saw it as the pure aircraft shape. It obsessed Jack Northrop. He had
worked for Lockheed, designing the Vega and Orion; in his spare time he
designed and built his first flying wing and tested it at Muroc Dry Lake in 1929.
By 1940, he had his own aircraft company, and his flying wing bomber was
approved for construction; its first flight was in 1946. When the YB-49 flew cross¬
country in 1949, President Truman went aboard. It was featured in the 1953 film
The War of the Worlds, looking as strange as the ships that bring the invading
aliens to Earth.

But the flying wing was a doomed dream. Northrop tried to modify the prop
version with jets, but it lost out to the B-36. Northrop lost his company in 1952,
sacrificed on the altar of the flying wing. As the B-2, the flying wing seemed
doomed again. Costs rose, and by the end of the Cold War the vision of the B-2 as
the successor to the B-52, the B-l, and other SAC bombers seemed absurd. Too
expensive and too precious to fly, it sat out the Gulf War.

The Bush administration killed the Navy’s A-12 Stealth carrier aircraft before it
was ever unveiled to the public. Two billion dollars had been spent—the budget,
one journalist noted, for the whole National Park Service. I thought of that every
time I saw a photo of the A-12, thought of the lodge at Yellowstone and rangers
in little Smokey the Bear hats.

Trader’s work impressed some of the public-interest muckrakers in Washington
who had been looking at the black budget for years. One of Trader’s admirers
was Steve Aftergood, John Pike’s colleague at the Federation of American
Scientists. Aftergood wrote the FAS’s Secrecy and Government Bulletin, which
tracked the progress of those battling excessive secrecy and, in the process,
charted the follies of the classification system. It was only a slight exaggeration to
say that what Ralph Nader was to Detroit, Aftergood had been to the Pentagon
and the intelligence agencies.

Keeping too many secrets is not only undemocratic, he wrote, it is expensive. It
requires guards, vaults, background checks. Think of it as servicing the national
information debt. A GAO study placed the figure at $2.2 billion, but pointedly
noted that its calculations had been hampered by the CIA’s refusal to cooperate.
Private industry spends an estimated $13 billion more adhering to government
security standards.

“The more secrecy you have,” Aftergood states, “the thinner your security
resources are spread, and there is a loss of respect for the system. That promotes

leaks.”

Out of incompetence, exhaustion, or spite, leaks had been increasing. The leaks
were a sign of institutional decadence, Aftergood explained: “The government
has found it easier to let the classification system disintegrate than to establish
new standards that command respect and loyalty. If current trends are taken to
the limit everything may eventually be classified—but nothing will be secret.”

Aftergood described a secrecy structure that might well collapse of its own
weight. I got the picture of a crumbling empire with a capital city too poor to
keep its walls repaired. The strange, distant civilization of the Pentagon appeared
a decaying fortress—Rome with the Huns outside, and the black marketeers
inside, trading through gaps in the crumbling walls. In fact, it sounded a lot like
the Soviet Union in its final years.

We parked under blue skies and continued toward the center of the universe on
foot. We climbed into a lovely canyon, its soaring rock walls neatly decorated
with green. A few other visitors had clambered up one of the walls and, in
triumph, taken off their shirts at the top. The canyon narrowed and twisted and
the plants at its base grew larger and more verdant. There was more water deep
in the canyon, as well as little beds of dirt where the grass grew almost like a
marsh, in contrast to the wide delta of desert into which the canyon opened.

We stopped at a cave where painted bighorns loped across the walls among
spirals and concentric circles. The walls were as liberally covered with drawings
as a New York subway station. Zigs and zags, circles and slashes, and romping
mountains goats and deer. These were homes, and I felt almost like an intruder.
They were comfortable little ledges where earlier peoples had slept and eaten and
laughed, their ceilings blackened by campfires.

Trader took pictures with his digital camera. He would post them on his Web
page, where there was a link to a compilation of Native American petroglyphs in
Nevada. I liked the idea that these ancient drawings would be burbling across
this most advanced medium as soon as he got home.

He had recently discovered a program for rapidly building makeshift runways
and hangars—a program that could turn all kinds of distant spaces into little
Dreamlands on short notice. He was looking at something called Timberwind, a
project for building nuclear rockets—an idea most people thought had been
scotched long ago. Of the Star Wars programs—“directed energy” weapons—
there was even less to be found.

The next night we went together to a Department of Energy public hearing in Las
Vegas. A formal solicitation of democratic sentiment on what the DOE should do
with the NTS now that the Cold War was over, it had brought Trader to town. He
had studied the eight lilac-covered volumes of the DOE’s environmental impact
statement, which considered the effects of different courses of action. What

would happen if the place was closed? What would happen if it was used for
other kinds of testing? But Trader wanted to know why Area 51, which had some
of worst known environmental problems of the whole test site, was not discussed.
The only mention of Area 51 in the document was this: “Under Public Land Order
1662 (June 20, 1958), approximately 38,400 acres were reserved for the use of
the Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the NTS. Management of this
land has since been delegated to the U.S. Air Force.” This was the old game of
shifting responsibility for the place between the Air Force and the DOE.

A hearing such as this is a winning process in many ways, a bizarre and rare
membrane in which the public in all its diversity touched the bureaucracy. It
made me proud to be an American in a way a flyover by Thunderbirds, for all
their powerful engines, high speeds, and amazing precision of flying, did not
necessarily do.

These hearings brought out local color. At an earlier one a man had stood up
and said, “In the name of God, my name is Moe. I’m a permanent resident who
has been living in Las Vegas for over six years. Believe in your God!” With that,
he raised his green Koran in his hand and began to speak. The number of the area
where the secret base was located was 51, he said, so he would read chapter 51
of the Koran: “Believe in your God. Promise in the winds which blow in holy
directions. Promise in the clouds that carry heavy rains. Promise to the angels
who perform the orders of God. Promise to all corners that whatever you say is
true.”

He came to another passage: “Abraham said, ‘What is your duty here?’ to the
aliens, ‘What is your duty here?’ The answer, ‘We are here to destroy the bad
crime!’ ” The man pointed to officials from the Bureau of Land Management and
continued: “All aliens! All aliens! We want to see the freedom of those captured
aliens, because we are here to save the good from the bad one more time.”

This evening was much calmer. There were the usual Greenpeace spokespeople
and, in counterpoint, a former Air Force officer who said he had eaten plutonium
day and night, and bragged that he “pissed plutonium.” He had cleaned up after
SAC when the B-52 bumped the tanker over Palomares, Spain, back in the sixties,
accidentally scattering plutonium the way the AEC scattered it intentionally in
Area 51 as part of Project 57, back in the fifties.

Trader got his chance. He read his formal statement and showed a couple of
the gemlike documentary artifacts he had picked up: one, a press release from
October 17, 1955, relating to the construction of the Watertown Strip by REECO;
the other a letter written on AEC stationery stating that a small private plane had
landed on the strip in 1957.

He footnoted a number of references to the place and asked why they hadn’t
said anything about Area 51. How could anyone make a judgment about the real
environmental impact of the Nevada nuclear test site, he argued, if they didn’t

know about Area 51 and such programs as Project 57 or Project Timberwind (the
secret nuclear-rocket program with a classified Environmental Impact
Statement)? Both the audience and the DOE panel listened silently. No one
seemed shocked by any of this.

The speaker who made the most impact on the audience was a representative
of the Western Shoshone, who pointed out that the tribe rejected the whole treaty
of Ruby Valley of 1863, under which the U.S. government claimed ownership of
the test site. The tribe had never accepted the federal payments that would have
put the treaty in force; they still claimed the land. Speaker after speaker had
made reference to the fact that taxpayers and citizens owned the test site, and I
had always thought of myself as being as much an owner as a watcher. Now I
had to consider that Native Americans might own the test site, and Dreamland
itself.

Ownership had been important to us watchers. It lent a certain self-
righteousness to our demands: We’re taxpayers, this is our place, we must be
allowed in on its decision-making. But part of the government’s secrecy about
Dreamland took the form of hiding or denying ownership. At the hearing, the
Department of Energy effectively denied ownership, as the Air Force frequently
did. But Native Americans, who did not share the white man’s sense of individual
or collective ownership of land, were now, somehow ironically, claiming it.

From the DOE to Trader to the Shoshone, everyone seemed to be selling a
different version of Dreamland, repping their views, agenting their image. They
were like real estate agents. I had once been warned of that profession: “The
difference between realty and reality is in the I.” And the eye.

23. “Job Knowledge”

Driving away from the Las Vegas hearing, I realized that there were very likely
petroglyphs similar to those we had seen in the canyon inside Dreamland and in
other distant reaches of the Nevada Test Site. There was even a report on the
subject—our tax dollars at work. “An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the
Groom Range” had been conducted in the summer of 1986, as part of the legal
requirements of the 1984 seizure of Bald Mountain and other perimeter areas.

The archaeologists had also found a number of middens—trash heaps—and
from the bones and other bits could determine what the tribal people had eaten
and how they had lived. In 1994, an effort was begun to poke through
Dreamland’s own midden. An ambitious and idealistic lawyer named Jonathan
Turley, who ran an organization called the Environmental Crimes Project at
George Washington University, filed suit on behalf of former Area 51 workers
against the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The defendants in the suit were Defense Secretary William Perry, National
Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, and EPA
administrator Carol Browner. In violation of law, the suit charged, the military at
Area 51 had burned hazardous wastes without a permit, exposing workers to
dangerous chemicals that made them ill and, in two cases, led to their deaths.
The best known, Robert Frost, was a sheet metal worker who had died in 1989 of
cirrhosis of the liver before the case had been filed. Frost had tried to sue
Lockheed, to no avail. His widow joined the plaintiffs in the suit against the
government. Frost had burned waste in open pits, he reported. His skin turned
red and began to peel. After his death, a Rutgers University biochemist, Peter
Kahn, found concentrations of dioxins and trichloroethylene in Frost’s body
tissues. Another worker, Walter Kasza, died at age seventy-three of liver and
kidney cancer.

Others in the suit gave accounts of burnings in open pits and the huge plumes
of smoke from dangerous corrosive chemicals—solvents and sealants, plastics,
paint wastes, by-products of composites, and stealth coatings. Their chemical
names were frightening even to the layman: dioxins, methyl ethyl ketone,
trichloroethylene, and dibenzofurans. The workers were given no protective
clothing or masks, they said, even after they asked for them. They were forced to
go into the pits and rifle through the half-burned material to be sure nothing was
left. Everything was burned—chemicals, papers, leftover prime rib and lobster
from the dining hall, furniture, and vehicles. They came down with all kinds of
symptoms, not just the skin rashes but eye irritations, headaches, blackouts.

Two big Kenworth eighteen-wheelers were always in evidence, one worker
reported, and huge fifty-five-gallon drums were brought in with materials from
Burbank. The burning took place at the edge of Papoose Lake, near the storied S-
4 of Lazar’s tales. Was the Lazar story the military’s own bizarre cover for the
burning?

The story suggested a pattern like that Joe Bacco had described at the test site,
where the sense of national urgency and emergency led to abuse of workers. In
1986, workers for the Skunk Works in Burbank sued Lockheed over illnesses they
said were acquired from exposure to substances used in building the Stealth
fighter—the chemicals used in its composites and in its radar-absorbing coverings
were extremely toxic. The local citizenry had joined in later. That was why the
original Skunk Works, the fenced-off wasteland I had visited, was now bare
ground. The workers who had dealt with similar substances at Area 51 itself were
stepping forward at great personal risk. Even as shielded by the John Doe
conventions in the legal documents, they were violating their oaths and
jeopardizing their pensions.

As I read about Turley’s suit and talked to him, I began to associate the sort of
cumulative secrecy Trader had described to me with a great midden packed with
layers of detritus. The suits were “citizens’ lawsuits,” not torts or damage claims.
The workers weren’t after money, they were after information. They simply
wanted to know the specific chemicals to which they had been exposed so they
could seek treatment. But the Air Force argued that even to take soil and air
samples might reveal the materials used in secret projects and thus compromise
them.

Secrecy, so useful in crises, could also become a dangerous substance. Turley
was charging that the abuse of secrecy was the means of hiding the abuse of the
chemicals. The Air Force, he argued, had committed a crime by burning
chemicals without a permit, and the result had been the injuries and deaths of
the workers. “We have compelling evidence that the government and its
contractors have used the secrecy of Groom Lake not to protect national security
but to shield the illegal disposal of hazardous waste.”

The Air Force defense was that national security considerations protected it
even against suits based on criminal activity.

It was a startling and unprecedented claim, far beyond anything Nixon had
made at the time of Watergate, for instance. The implications were huge: Would
the same national security defense have placed the officials beyond the reach of
prosecution for murder? (Two of the plaintiffs had died, after all.) But no one had
ever sued a black facility before.

At first the Air Force lawyers denied the existence of the facility, but Turley
came up with three hundred pages of references to Area 51 and Project 51 in Air
Force and DOE documents, and finally the officials acknowledged the

memorandum of agreement that charged them with running it. 1 Claiming that
Area 51 did not exist, the Air Force had apparently begun to avoid all references
to it, using “Groom Lake” instead.

Area 51, after all, was an obsolete designation bestowed more than thirty years
ago by the NTS and the AEC. The Air Force claimed the place was run by the
Department of Energy (formerly the AEC), which in turn claimed it had given up
authority years ago. The overlapping colors on the map of Dreamland became a
means for passing the buck.

By 1994 the Air Force issued a grudging statement of acknowledgment that
carefully avoided using the term “Area 51”: “There are a variety of facilities
throughout the Nellis Range Complex. We do have facilities within the complex
near the dry lake bed of Groom Lake. The facilities of the Nellis Range Complex
are used for testing and training technologies, operations, and systems critical to
the effectiveness of U.S. military forces. Specific activities conducted at Nellis
cannot be discussed any further than that.”

In an attempt to blunt the claims of the suit, the Air Force allowed
Environmental Protection Agency inspectors into the base, but did not release
any information about what they had found. It simply promised to abide by the
environmental laws.

As part of the case materials, Turley obtained a copy of a Groom Lake security
manual, and before long Glenn Campbell had posted it on the Internet. The
government responded absurdly, by retroactively classifying the document.

The thirty-page booklet, of which there were several copies in multiple
revisions, bore on its front cover the words “Det 3 SP Job Knowledge.”
“Detachment 3 Special Police” was the assumed meaning of the initials.

It appeared to be the security manual for Dreamland and included a list of
radio code names, procedures, and even maps of the base and insides of some
buildings. The maps showed the Scoot-N-Hide sheds—Is this an official
trademark?, I wondered—used for concealing equipment from satellites, and the
Quik Kill radars and surface-to-air missiles that had long been rumored. There
were radio code words for areas and structures. In keeping with the best military
tradition, everything had to be renamed. The test site was “Over the Hill,” and
Rachel was “North town.”

For years, there was talk of high living at Groom Lake, and the manual’s maps
seemed to confirm the legends of Sam’s Place, the long-rumored base casino and
bar, as finely carpeted and outfitted, the Lore had it, as any in Las Vegas. The
manual also offered some confirmation of the tales of fine food at the base, of
grapefruits flown in from Israel, of lobsters and other delicacies, of huge spring
water bills. It suggested a fleet of Auroras flying in odd delicacies, tucked in the
corner of a cockpit, from the antipodes.

Was it real? The manual was crude and klutzy. It seemed unlikely that the Air
Force would have put the words “Liberty and Justice for All” on the badges that
appeared on its first page. The tone of the code names was unconvincing. “Dutch
Apple” for the headquarters seemed inappropriately imaginative—unless it
reflected some kind of inside joke. Procedures were outlined for moving test
articles. When back in the civilian world, the “special police” were instructed to
say that they “worked for EG&G at the test site.” There was quite detailed and
accurate information on the operation of the road sensors, facts known to the
outside world.

But just who was the manual written for? For the deputized guards, working
for Wackenhut or EG&G or other contractors? It seemed to be written just
awkwardly enough to be real. It made me wonder again about the MJ-12
documents, which shared some of the same crude explanatory quality. And if the
manual was not real, why then had the government sought to classify it?

The government had never before tried such a thing, and by definition
information already public cannot be made secret. Did the impossibility of such
an effort suggest it was merely a ruse to make the document seem genuine? If so,
why?

The case came before federal judge Philip Pro. But Judge Pro had previously
found the government not liable for damages to some 216 workers who had been
exposed to radiation at the NTS between 1951 and 1981—workers like Joe Bacco
—many of whom had been assigned at times to Area 51 itself. Pro seemed to
believe in keeping security. All he wanted was a letter from the president of the
United States swearing that we needed to keep Dreamland in the dark. And he
got it. In September 1995, Bill Clinton signed a statement affirming that to reveal
what Turley and his clients wanted to know about Groom Lake “could reasonably
be expected” to damage the national security.

The government pressed for the names of the John Doe clients, a request
Turley felt sure was meant to intimidate the workers. Then Judge Pro ordered the
documents in the case sealed. What that meant became clear all of a sudden. In
the summer of 1995, Turley was in Chicago at the bedside of his ill father when
he got a call: OSI agents were on their way over to the George Washington
University Law Center to seal his office. He immediately called his secretary back
in Washington and asked her to alert campus security. He had a vision of the
bicycle-mounted campus cops in hand-to-hand combat with OSI commandos
infiltrating through the ventilation system. Turley’s office was officially sealed,
but the files relating to the case had been placed in a safe to which only he and
one associate had the combination. It was like an embassy of Dreamland inside
the District of Columbia.

In 1995, the case against the EPA was dismissed, and, the following year, so
was the case against the Air Force. In the fall of 1997, the Ninth Federal Circuit

Court took up Turley’s appeal. The following year, the Supreme Court would
reject his final appeal.

If the case had come to trial, Turley said, he planned to call the secretary of
defense, the secretary of the Air Force, and the president’s national security
adviser. If none of them was willing to admit to the existence of the base, then he
said he would call representatives of the Russian embassy. The Soviets, after all,
had photographed the base from their satellites.

Turley had the government caught in a post-Cold War half nelson: “While the
United States government refuses to acknowledge the existence of this base to the
American public,” he was able to argue, “the Russian government recently
declassified much of its intelligence information as part of a new openness policy
following the fall of the Communist regime and the adoption of democratic
process.” And since the 1993 signing of the Open Skies treaty, the Russians and
all other signatory nations had a right to do so.

In other words, it was legal for foreigners to photograph the base, but not for
the Americans who had paid for it.

24. Rave

If sinister forces were manipulating the mass media, they were doing it quite
effectively. Area 51 was infiltrating television as stealthily as any Hollywood
extraterrestrials had ever invaded the planet. It kept popping up, like the Area 51
video game itself, in the oddest places. And the media had their own strange and
mythologizing view of Dreamland.

In Las Vegas, which presented subcultures as casino themes, the Area 51 club
opened, its big signs in red-and-white warning stripes and stencil letters visible
from the freeway, x-treme party, escape reality, they read. A few months later the club
closed, with appropriate mystery.

A whole range of cable shows dealing with the mysterious came to Rachel and
talked to Interceptors. Agent X showed up on MTV! And PsychoSpy could be
counted on to give good soundbite. His sentences were ambiguous enough to be
useful; he seemed to know where the editing would happen.

There was a familiar pattern to most of the programs: some lights over the
Jumbled Hills—Janet aircraft or flares, typically—the standard photos of the
base, sometimes an establishing shot of Las Vegas neon, talking heads saying
there were “mysterious things flying.” The key to all the segments was to leave
open the question of whether or not there were real saucers hovering over the
area like one of those magnesium flares.

After the image of the Manta appeared in magazines, Steve Douglass was
flooded with calls from television and print reporters, and even Hollywood
producers. Within a few days, the major networks had paid calls on him, and
Unsolved Mysteries, the tabloid TV series, dispatched two trucks and camera crews
to his quiet Amarillo street.

Robert Stack, the host and erstwhile battery pitchman, didn’t like the
antigovernment tone he saw creeping in to the piece, so they added a line to the
script to the effect that “the Air Force denies the planes are theirs. So the
question remains, Whose are they?” It was important for the general format of
Unsolved Mysteries, as in the others, that the “question should remain.” The truth
had to stay out there.

In April 1994, ABC-TV, while on a shoot, clumsily bumped into the camou
dudes, who stopped the crew and confiscated its film, perhaps irritated by the
fact that CNN had shortly before set up a camera atop Freedom Ridge and
broadcast views of the base.

By May, the press safaris to Freedom Ridge had become so frequent, the

viewing points so crowded, that PsychoSpy described a fistfight between two
reporters. It amazed the Interceptors, who remembered when few knew the way
up at all. In October, Larry King and entourage descended on Rachel. They set up
on the side of the road, with the wrong set of hills in the background. No saucer
landing in the desert could have looked stranger than Larry’s stage set—desk,
chairs, lights, and coffee mugs—glowing amid the trampled sage.

Someone mailed Steve a videotape shot by two Las Vegas cops who had read
about the TR3A and headed north to Dreamland. Perhaps inspired by beer, they
caught sight of something in the sky that danced wildly on the tape, a sign of a
camera held by uncertain hands. Their voices were audible, screaming, “It’s the
fuckin’ Manta! It’s the fuckin’ Manta!” Steve concluded that the craft was
probably a B-l.

All of a sudden you could find references to Area 51 everywhere. There were
scenery files for the popular Microsoft game Flight Simulator that one could
download from the Internet to “fly over” Groom Lake. The Marvel company
latched on to Area 51, producing a comic or two, and television had embraced it.

An NBC-TV program called Dark Skies, set in the mid-sixties, featured aliens
digging an underground base beneath Area 51 and Howard Hughes catching on
to their plans. “We’ve got to get to Dreamland” was the most memorable line. A
CD-ROM came out with the old cartoon character Jonny Quest delving first into
the mysteries of Roswell and then into Area 51.

The story of Area 51 had long held special appeal to technogeeks. One of the
Apple Newton software group, for instance, took an interest in it after a trip to
Rachel in 1994. He hid a secret feature in one version of the software: If you
knew where to click, you could picture Area 51 on the Newton’s map. If the user
picked Area 51 from the map, the icons in the date book application took on an
alien theme—alien faces, flying saucers, robots, and so on.

Then, in August 1995, as the story goes—and we are strictly amid the Lore
here—a cryptographer at the CIA was one of the beta testers for the new
program. When he saw Area 51, he went to his bosses, who demanded Apple
remove the reference. Management “caved in,” the sources say, but the feature
was covered over rather than removed and there is yet a trick for retrieving it.

Then the notion of overlapping the Generation X demographic and the UFO
one began to swarm in the minds of marketing types—the Gen X files, that was
the concept. In the second episode of The X Files, the popular show that twists the
weirdness of Twin Peaks into all sorts of conspiracy lores, Dreamland was
transferred from Nevada to Utah, where it became “Ellens Air Force Base.” “A
mecca for UFO buffs,” like Groom Lake, it is omitted from USGS maps, and the
hills above Dreamland became tall reeds—equally good hiding places.

In this version of the story, the base is rumored to be “one of six sites” to which

the Roswell wreckage was shipped. There the round craft built using alien
technology became triangular; the Little A“Le”Inn is transformed into a diner
with a fat lady who took UFO snapshots off her back porch. Agents Mulder and
Scully see dancing lights and encounter hovering craft. They are menaced by men
in black with the requisite sunglasses, and a black helicopter dives at them. There
is a reference to “the Aurora project,” and dabblings with mental reprogramming.
“That’s unreal,” they conclude, then, “I’ve never seen anything like that,” leaving
hanging the suggestion of a causal link between the two statements.

The redoubtable engine of American marketing, as simultaneously wondrous and
horrific as the military machine, had quickly moved to sell teen alienation back
to Gen-X. Soon I noticed alien faces, with the almond eyes and big head,
everywhere—alien jewelry, alien T-shirts, alien temporary tattoos in the malls, in
the hip shops in the East Village of New York. The alien face had become a wry
nineties equivalent of the seventies-era smiley face.

The image of the big-eyed “gray” alien was set in the early eighties by authors
Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber, and it superseded earlier images of
extraterrestrials. If earlier aliens had represented Communist invaders ( Invasion of
the Body Snatchers ) or disease (Alien) or been depicted as friendly babylike
creatures (Close Encounters and E.T.), this new one was a huge fetus or hungry
child, with big Keane kid eyes. It was also an echo of Munch’s Scream —the very
face of modern angst.

This alien face had long been familiar, but had never been so graphically
standardized before. It summed up a growing American subculture devoted to
ideas of abduction and implantation that paralleled a fascination with recovering
childhood experiences—commonly those of abuse—via hypnosis. In 1995, Testor
released a plastic model kit of a standing gray alien, proof that it had become the
iconic image of the extraterrestrial, just as the flying saucer was of the UFO.

The new image of the alien was as much ironic as iconic. It was significant that
we had begun calling creatures from other planets “alien” again in the eighties,
after the previous decade had popularized “extraterrestrial.” Much of the new
alien material turned on the puns associated with “alien”—the joke was that the
grays figured as immigrants. The face had become as much a graphic cliche, an
ethnic cartoon, as Sambo or Uncle Tom. Was America’s latest favorite ethnic
group from Zeta Reticuli? “Do we call them Astro Americans?” a friend asked.

Tropes of the alien often serve as parables for dealing with issues such as
immigration. Note, for instance, the differing degrees of irony evidenced in
Coneheads (“We are ... from France,” and their nemesis in the film is an INS
agent) and Alien Nation, where the aliens exhibit the irritating traits of various
earthly minority groups: They are ex-slaves with strange music; they threaten to
take jobs and resources from Earth natives; they eat bizarre food and score
intimidatingly high on math tests. Men in Black continued the theme, tossing off

jokes about immigrant New York taxi drivers.

My favorite T-shirt on this theme depicts a cliche alien wearing a sombrero and
bandoleers, bearing the legend: “We don’t want no stinkin green cards.”

The alien face’s iconism was accomplished when it became subject to
manipulation of context and ironic reference. Thus T-shirts picture the Beatles
with alien heads, or the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” trio rendered in
alien faces, and a whole host of alien-face pop artifacts—earrings, Schwa
artifacts, Alien Factory skateboard graphics.

The alien theme is strong in music. The band Foo Fighters recorded on its own
Roswell Records label, and an album by the group Spacehog is called Resident
Alien, its cover art bearing an extraterrestrial “green card.”

Television could handle the pop-alien theme with equal facility as drama or
comedy. “Aliens are all around us,” intones the narrator at the beginning of Third
Rock from the Sun, a sitcom in the tradition of My Favorite Martian, Mork and
Mindy, and ALF —a view of the outsider as observer as old as Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters.

In the series Dark Skies, the alien invasion turns out to have been so subtle and
surreptitious that it has touched every major event of the last fifty years, from the
shooting down of the U-2 to Project Mercury to the Kennedy assassination.
Conspiracy theorists are alienated by mainstream explanations, of course.
Concealment and conspiracy is another theme behind the image—it was the logo
of the Big Cover-up, the “Cosmic Watergate.” “The government is lying,” T-shirts
told us.

In time, the alien face came to appear to me as the face of suspicion of
government—and the projection, perhaps, of the new generation’s alienation.
“We are not alone,” the slogan that often captions the gray face, may be as much
an expression of hope as an assertion of belief. Someone once said, “Aliens are
alien because we alienate them.” That was ALF, the sitcom alien.

By the spring of 1996, Hollywood was turning the Lore from folktale to fodder
for commerce. The Interceptors were at once amused, irked, and perhaps a bit
sad, resentful that the Hollywood dream machine was taking over their base,
dismayed at a crass mercenary effort to cash in on the Black Mailbox.

The idea behind renaming Nevada Highway 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway
was to bring tourists to the area. When the Nevada legislature held hearings on
the idea, the only witnesses to appear—and they were in favor—were Joe and
Pat Travis, the largest likely economic beneficiaries of the idea, and Ambassador
Merlyn Merlin, himself an avowed extraterrestrial.

PsychoSpy took a hard line against the renaming, more, one suspects, out of an
instinct to oppose government than for his stated reason that no thought had
been given to the consequences of bringing tourists to the area and possibly into

contact with the camou dudes. If anything, he felt his own bailiwick was being
invaded—he was after all the first to produce a tourist guide, the first to lead
groups to the perimeter, the first to pioneer four-wheel drive to the top of
Freedom Ridge. Now it was all about selling souvenirs. Yet PsychoSpy himself
had set this all in motion when he printed up his first T-shirt bearing the
invented Dreamland patch.

The dedication of the ET Highway and the unveiling of the road signs that
marked it was a ceremony twice hijacked. The first time was by the producers of
the film Independence Day, which would dramatically change the Area 51 Lore.
Whetting anticipation for the summer ’96 release of the movie, its stars agreed to
join the ET Highway dedication, and the producers donated a “time capsule” to
Rachel. This guaranteed that the politicians would be overshadowed.

In front of the Little A“Le”Inn, actors Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum moved
among a thin crowd and posed in front of the signs as Nevada tourism officials
explained that prospective visitors could call an 800 number for an “ET Highway
Experience” package complete with map. The governor joked that perhaps the
signs should have been placed so they could be read from above.

A well-known state legislator named Bob Price, an eccentric and colorful
character who led “fact-finding trips” to the cathouses, appeared in Darth Vader
costume. “You’re Bob Price,” shrewdly commented a Rachel youngster, looking
right at him.

“The only aliens I’ve seen are the people who visit here,” a little girl told Mary
Manning, the reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and this youngster was
more correct than she knew.

The event was hijacked a second time on the highway itself. While PsychoSpy
boycotted the dedication, the Minister and Agent X rode along in the convoy,
which began in a parking lot in Las Vegas and headed up to Rachel for the
unveiling of the official ET Highway signs along Highway 375. They portrayed
the silhouettes of flying saucers and—no ET here—an F-117 in silhouette.

Agent X led the way in a rented red LeBaron; the Minister’s CRX was in fifth
place. There were about thirty cars and a big charter bus. As they came down
from Hancock Summit into the Tikaboo Valley about thirty miles south of Rachel,
just at the point where the Groom Road stretched out to the west, looking as
always like a pole of dust rising straight into the air, the Minister caught sight of
a bright yellow sign stuck into the dirt by the roadside, with an arrow to the left
and the official ET Highway logo. Soon the whole convoy was rumbling in a
cloud of dust down the dirt road, straight toward the Area 51 perimeter.

It was a plot by the Interceptors, code-named Operation Coyote, after the
cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, who is constantly posting fake road signs to
divert the Roadrunner.

The Minister decided to pull off before he got to the guard shack he knew lay a
few miles ahead. He understood the rule: You’re under arrest once you get to the
shack, which is on the wrong side of the perimeter.

Then a Nevada highway patrolman realized what was happening and came
roaring up, siren wailing, lights blazing. Through the dust ahead, the Minister
could see the lead car taking a sharp right-hand turn onto a dusty road that
doubled back toward route 375, through the Medlin ranch. But the planners of
the diversion had clearly hoped that it might go all the way—the governor of
Nevada and other dignitaries, the whole motley movie and business crowd
arriving at the perimeter. Hell, at the guardhouse!

Independence Day, which set box-office records by grossing nearly $150 million in
its first two weeks of release in July 1996, established Dreamland in the popular
mind—but with a twist. The film provided a key new link in the Lore. It tied Area
51 directly to Roswell, whose legend was also growing daily. While, of course,
the traditional story had tied Roswell to Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat, the legendary
repository of recovered saucers and bodies, Independence Day’s story had them
ending up at Area 51. At one point, the president says disdainfully, “I can assure
you there is no Area 51.” “Well, Mr. President,” the head of the CIA responds,
“that’s not... exactly ... true.”

Area 51 becomes the headquarters in the movie from which Earth resists
invasion. The president asks the questions we were all asking about Area 51.
“How come I wasn’t told about this place?” “How did they keep this secret?”
“How did they pay for it all?” But since Area 51 ends up saving humanity, the
implication is that we should be grateful it was there. Thus millions of people
heard about Area 51 for the first time.

Hollywood’s Area 51 looks more like we’d imagined it than the real one: It is
slicker, shinier, more sci-fi. The film conjures up an underground lab with tilted
glass walls and aliens stored in giant lava-lamp-like containers. It’s packed with
high-tech equipment: all the war rooms and secret labs of a dozen films of the
past rolled into one. It looks, in fact, something like the Area 51 in the video
game.

In the early nineties, Ed McCracken, the CEO of Silicon Graphics, whose
workstations are used both to devise new aircraft designs and to produce movie
special effects, declared that the demands of mass media had supplanted those of
the Pentagon as the engine of technological innovation. A 1996 Air Force report
on the future, called “New World Vistas,” declared that “entertainment
organizations” had the skills and means to produce better simulators than the
military.

Was Hollywood supplanting the Pentagon? Would the Dreamworks movie
studio be the future source of Dreamland’s technology?

“Calling all ‘Encountered People’!” read the proclamation that appeared on the
Internet in August 1996. An outfit calling itself Zzyzx Productions and “The
Center for the Study of Aerial Phenomenon” announced “Abduction, live at Area
51. An all-night political action rally and UFO-watching vigil” and “rave party.”
The fine print coyly declared an intention to “encourage peace, love, and
harmony, so leave your ray guns at home.” The tickets, twenty-five dollars a pop,
would be available through TicketMaster.

That seemed reasonable for a pass to Area 51, only the party turned out to be
scheduled for a lot behind the trailers in Rachel. The music would be techno—the
robotic dance stuff of the new Germany, steeped in the dust of the Wall, now
imported, manipulated, and cut to street strength. The idea seemed to be that the
fellows at the base might warm to this New Age Woodstock. What I was hoping
for was something more like the Saucerian conventions at Giant Rock.

The road was familiar to me now, but it seemed somehow different—richer—
with each trip. The landscape’s browns and tans seemed to contain rather than
exclude colors, if not outright reds and greens, at least what the red and green
brown might dream of being. In the little settlements along the way, a few
optimists attempted to fight the browns of the desert by painting their houses and
stores in bright aqua or turquoise. It took me a while to see how shrewd a choice
that color was, how that turquoise sang out against the landscape. It was the
direct opposite and a powerful antidote to the oppressive hue of the desert.

On the way up to Rachel I stopped for gas. As I paid and came back to the car,
I noticed a world-weary guy with a sleeveless shirt and a beat-up pickup. “How
are you?” I asked.

“A little closer to somewhere,” he answered, as if trying to convince himself.

And I almost said, “But still a hell of a long way from anywhere.”

When I finally reached the Black Mailbox, I spotted a Camry with Arizona
plates parked beside it. I pulled over to talk to a young couple who stood looking
off toward the Ridge. The man was a stockbroker. “They say this is the place,” he
commented, dreamily. “We drove all the way from Tucson, just to see.”

The most romantic thing about the rave was the dust swirling in the big
floodlights. The promoters had promised “sunbaked desert dance dirt,” “fire¬
breathing tribal drum circle,” and all-night dancing in the shadows of the
Jumbled Hills. They held open the possibility that the boys at the base might be
tickled enough to float one up just over the Ridge, offer a hint of the mysteries
beyond. The partygoers I talked to knew of Area 51 only as a saucer site. They
were ignorant of the history of the U-2 and the Blackbirds.

In Rachel, the locals—piqued by the prospect of drugged and drunken youth
from as far away as Los Angeles—watched with interest. The sheriff’s office
required the promoters to post a large bond, and deputies’ cars patrolled the area.

Strange vehicles—Woodstock-era Microbuses, junker compacts with out-of-state
plates—began to appear in front of the Quik Pik and the Inn.

At the Research Center, some of the Interceptors gathered to watch. In the little
yard by the trailer, they dipped chips and roasted hot dogs and marveled at the
speed with which the media machine had latched on to the mythology of Area
51.

“It’s become the dominant urban folk legend of the nineties,” Zero said in the
kitchen, unwrapping more chips. Behind the trailer was a little shed with a
platform on its roof that turned out to be handy for viewing the preparations. We
climbed up to look at the assembling trucks and lights and speakers. It was Little
Freedom Ridge, a mini-Tikaboo, but it would bear the weight of only three or
four people.

I had checked into a motel up the road in Alamo. The lady at the desk told me
they had a special deal: two bucks extra for five channels of TV, five dollars for
the cable and ten channels more. I went the whole hog: a better rate per channel.
Besides, I felt a need to stay close to the umbilical cord of mainstream culture.

I lay down for a few minutes in the afternoon and in a groggy sleep dreamed
that I had figured out the secret of the numbering system for the areas at the test
site, which appeared randomly on the map. It all had to do, I dreamed, with an
angle of the border of each area from the north-south axis. When I awoke and
looked again at the map, I realized the dream scheme made no sense at all, that it
was these sorts of angular alignments that the supporters of the Mars face, the
believers in ancient civilizations and secret bases on Mars and the moon, used to
support their case.

The individual’s dreamwork is echoed in that of his culture. The same
strategies of compression, substitution, abbreviation, displacement, and
symbolism Freud sees in individual dreams may apply, I realized, to the shapes of
tales in the Lore.

If you believed that dreams were worth looking at as a way to understand a
person’s hopes and fears, then wouldn’t looking at the dreams of a culture
accomplish the same thing? Couldn’t the fascinations of its core be written in the
obsessions of the fringe? A tunnel at the nuclear test site evolved into a network
of underground railroads, perhaps, a MiG was transmuted into an alien ship, a
flare into a saucer’s light. I thought of the tales of the footprints of deer melting
out in the sun into those of the imagined Yeti.

Any dream expresses a wish, Freud states, but how could some of the dark and
frightening dreams I had heard be wishes? They saw the source of the fear
discharged, was Freud’s answer. They granted a wish, too, for order and
explanation—dreams crystallized vague fear into a specific bogeyman, which one
could better comprehend. Couldn’t the fear of a new world order be an

expression of a desire for order; couldn’t the arrival of aliens save us by
organizing us to resist?

The souvenir vendors had arrived first thing in the morning. The latest item was
a T-shirt showing a saucer over the lake bed and the legend “Area 51 Yacht
Club.” One vendor, an enormous man selling glow-in-the-dark alien heads, T-
shirts, and charms, told me he used to be with Navy Intelligence. He sat in a
minivan beside the Rachel Quik Pik, wearing a SEAL team T-shirt and an LAPD
bomb squad cap.

“Naval Intelligence,” he repeated. “Ever hear of Richard Marcinko? Seal Team
Seven. It’s not supposed to exist, but it does.”

He had strong opinions on Bob Lazar’s story. “That W-2 is as real as can be,” he
said.

That night, huge screens surrounded the circular dance floor, flashing music-
video images back on themselves, reminding some of old drivein movie screens.
But only a few dozen dancers showed up, groggy after the long drive dodging the
cows that sat on the edges of the ET Highway. The bitter alkaline dust stung the
eyes and seeped into every fissure of clothing and body.

A few misguided Hollywood types ended up in town. At one point a limousine
turned in to the parking lot and I caught a glimpse of a softly lit interior, packed
with cut-crystal decanters glowing like artifacts in an old-fashioned sci-fi film.
Then the dust rose up and covered it all.

The UFO souvenirs failed to sell well. At the end of the evening, I caught sight
of the Naval Intelligence man still sitting in the minivan. There was no evidence
he had ever left it.

25. Remote Viewing; or, “Anomalous Cognition”

At the rave, the promoters had lined up a series of real-life “abductees,” who sat
at card tables arrayed under tents looking ill at ease. Among them was a woman
who did not claim to be an abductee but was willing to talk—a lot, very fast, and
in run-on sentences—about black helicopters, Tesla, thought bubbles,
interdimensionals, and portals. Her name was Kathleen Ford, and around the
time I first climbed the Ridge and looked down on the base, she’d begun taking
pictures of strange floating or flying objects along Mailbox Road, looking west
over the Jumbled Hills toward Dreamland.

“At first I wanted to take pictures of UFOs and sell them to magazines and
make money,” she told me. A blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, she would come up
every few weeks and shoot day and night.

Ford was clearly smarting from a long history of encountering skepticism—
how often had she heard that this image, say, couldn’t be a flare, or that one was
surely not the effects of lens or diaphragm. She pointed out one photo that was
shot on Easter Sunday, a holiday that even the denizens of Dreamland respected,
she said, and on which they did not fly.

I had seen some of these snapshots on the wall at the Little A“Le”Inn, along
with all the other greasy, dusty, spotted images of lights in the sky. They were all
carefully labeled with details about the camera and film used. In almost every
instance, the name of the camera was misspelled. The captions included as much
specificity about the time, date, and equipment as there was a lack of specificity
about their content. “Two visible ships taken by Mail Box Road Cannon with 200
Zoom Kodak Gold 200.” Or, “Invisible ship with light beam going below
mountain. This photo was shot facing west at Mail Box Road at 7:50 A.M. Fugi
Automatic with 80 zoom, Kodak T-Max, 400 B/W.”

One word of that caption caught my attention: invisible. As in: “This invisible
object appeared after I experimented with music.”

By invisible, I understood her to mean that things showed up in the
photographs without having been visible when the shutter was snapped.

“That’s when I got the eyeball,” she said.

“The what?” I asked.

“The eyeball. I give them all names and this one I just call the eyeball. It’s
translucent.”

Indeed it could be an eyeball, floating in front of the flash-lit, out-of-focus grass

by the highway, the soft LED digits of the dating function visible in the lower
right-hand corner. Emerson’s transcendental eyeball, Jung’s eye in the sky—
whatever you wanted to call it.

“After I got this one I went, ‘Oh ... my ... God.’ I cried for three weeks. They’ve
lied to us, I thought. When I saw this, everything I had read about UFOs and had
dismissed suddenly became feasible and I cried, cried, cried, cried.”

I picked up the book Ford said had inspired her. The paperback cover of Silent
Invasion, by Ellen Crystall, Ph.D., bore an image of an alien face, like a film still.
Inside were lots of photographs that resembled Ford’s, pictures of “Tesla globes,”
spaceships, even aliens in Westchester County, New York.

Crystall was the clear source of inspiration at least for Ford’s captions: The
author, with her apt New Age name, had supplied the same details of camera and
film type for her photos. Here was a typical Crystall caption: “Large Tesla Field.
Taken: June 12, 1988, at Pine Bush, New York. Camera: Nikon 35mm SLR with
50mm lens. Film: Kodacolor negative print film (ASA 400). Exposure: 1/60 sec.
at f//1.4 with flash.” Elsewhere, she supplied the name of her developer:
Fotomat.

Crystall’s globes and ships could also have been drops of some kind of staining
liquid on the film or lens, but she saw them as Tesla bubbles and beams and ships
and aliens. She might not have seen it unless she believed it. There was a twist:
While Ford had photographed UFOs she couldn’t see with her eye, Crystall
claimed to have seen UFOs that didn’t appear in her pictures. Some UFOs, she
believed, generated shortwave or other radiation that made them invisible. She
had seen triangles in Westchester County that resembled the black planes seen in
Nevada and California. But realizing that such planes were not generally tested in
populated areas, she concluded that “there may be forms of stealth aircraft that
are ‘true’ UFOs built and operated by human beings.”

She argues that the B-2 Stealth bomber shown to the public “is really a decoy
to divert attention from where the money and effort are really being placed—
namely, on construction of enhanced stealth craft capable of hovering at ground
level, cruising at speeds ranging from slow walk to thousands of miles per hour,
and turning invisible to the human eye. In other words—American UFOs.”

Crystall’s and Ford’s photographs reminded me of the strange and sinister
forms, like malign bacteria, seen through a microscope; or of the atomic blasts in
Harold Edgerton’s photographs—no vision of an alien invasion could ever
conjure up a more sinister-looking life-form than these death-forms, slices of
vision thinner than the human eye could seize. Ford’s photos were just as
disturbing.

Invisible craft made visible—that was Ford’s goal. I was reminded of a chapter in
the Air Force “New Vistas” report boldy headed “Invisible Airplanes.” The report

talks about all the planes of tomorrow, unmanned, invisible to radar, to infrared,
to the human eye. The fighting robot planes—UCAVs—that would succeed UAVs
would have even stranger shapes. They might look like tailless triangles, like
pumpkin seeds, even like discs. “Potentially,” said Air Force planners in Aviation
Week, “a saucer shape could produce the most maneuverable UCAV if combined
with vectored thrust for maximum lateral agility. Moreover, a weapon could be
pointed by simply rotating the aircraft without altering course.”

Stealth makes airplanes almost invisible to radar but not to light, so they fly
only in the dark. “We rule the night,” Lockheed’s ads bragged. But not the day.
The next step was to do for vision what stealth did for radar: create high-tech
camouflage.

There was pretty good evidence that some of the planes flying in Dreamland
were already making themselves invisible by day. They wore electronic skins.
They used a technology that was like wrapping the whole airplane in the liquid
crystal display of some laptop-computer screen, turning it into a fabric that could
be laid on, bent, or built up like tile, or mosaic. It was something called
Polyaniline Radar Absorbent composite, “optically transparent” except when
charged with a 24-volt current that triggers the camouflage receptors. They read
the ambient light—its brightness but also its hue—and are adapted to match.
These are chameleon airplanes.

One such program had been around for a while, called Ivy. I.V? For invisible?

I asked Steve about it: Did this mean that the reason people hadn’t been seeing
any planes flying above Dreamland recently was because they couldn’t be seen?
If you didn’t see them, must they be invisible? “Have there been,” I asked before
realizing what I was saying, “any confirmed sightings of these aircraft?”

But sure enough, Agent X had recorded one such “sighting” near Warm
Springs. He heard the whistling of a passing airframe first, then it was flying so
low he felt the pressure of the air change. But he saw it, too, and he explained
how: You observe an invisible airplane by seeing its invisibility—its interruption
of the stars in the sky above it, and of the faint glow of Las Vegas behind it.

Ford’s photographs were confirmed sightings all right, proof that you had to
believe to see. When she was taking pictures, Ford explained, “I go into alpha
beta.” I looked baffled.

“You know, dream state, alpha beta. And these images are very dreamy.”

In other pictures, Ford pointed out a different sort of blob. “These here may be
interdimensional entities,” she explained. They might, in other words, signify
creatures from other realms of space-time.

“People told me there are interdimensionals. Aliens that can move in and out.
John Lear talked about the government having EBEs—‘extra-biological entities’—
and the government is having a hard time with them. They keep them in an

electromagnetic field but they just drift in and out.”

At the Inn, Chuck Clark talked about interdimensionals, too. Far out as it
sounded, the idea struck me as one of the most provocative areas of UFO-related
thinking. What we had once taken for aliens from another star system, this theory
went, might instead be time travelers or visitors from parallel universes. These
concepts, it seemed to me, were more worthy of consideration, at least on
intellectual terms, than the saucers themselves.

Increasingly physicists, both popular and academic, were writing and talking
about such ideas, born of the paradoxes of quantum theory. Aspects of quantum
theory seemed to require the postulation of parallel or multiple universes. Space-
time “wormholes” made time travel a theoretical possibility. String theory
projected scenarios wherein an original universe of twenty-one or thirty-four
dimensions might have collapsed into the present four.

According to quantum theory, subatomic particles could apparently be in
several places at once. From those bits of quantum doubt, theories of parallel,
alternate universes had arisen, like conspiracy theories from Eisenhower’s
toothache. An alternate universe might be identical to this one, except that I have
brown instead of blue eyes. Or, more to the point, a subatomic particle that is
here in one universe might be there in its neighbor.

Quite respectable efforts to solve the quantum uncertainty principle had
resulted in scientific experiments postulating a theory of parallel universes. In the
late fifties, the respected physicist Bryce DeWitt proposed such a solution. It
wouldn’t take so many universes, he had calculated, only about ten to the
hundredth power. Soon physicists were using the term “multiverse” for the
totality of possibilities.

All the little bits of quantum uncertainty, all that black matter, made the
universe a kind of sponge of uncertainty. Just as Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle and Schrodinger’s cat helped translate hard-core science into vaguely
understood popular lore ratifying wider feelings about how uncertain knowledge
had become, the physics of the multiverse became attached to popular ideas of
parallel modes of existence—“other dimensions,” in the crudest vocabulary of
Hollywood, or interdimensionals.

The youfers were always talking about how the recognition of other
intelligences in the universe would produce a change in thinking, such as the one
brought about by the discovery that the sun was at the center of the solar system
and not the earth, or the European discovery of America. I could understand this:
Nobody wants to be part of the crowd jeering Galileo, nobody wants to be the
last flat-earther. This was, after all, the Greatest Story in Human History.

But spacecraft bearing almond-eyed aliens from Zeta Reticuli was far less
convincing as a scientific revolution than parallel universe theory. With roots in
mainstream physics, its ideas seemed both wondrous and possible. In his

modestly titled book The Fabric of Reality, the brilliant physicist David Deutsch
discussed how all of twentieth-century physics pointed to parallel universes. The
facts were there, he argued, only bold imagination was lacking for their
acceptance. For me, photographs like Ford’s came to suggest this element of
imagination: I was as seduced by the images as by the ideas. The odd hovering
shapes, the soft spray of flash on desert plants and pavement edges, the mere hint
of landscape beyond, were like diagrams of the darker, sketchier implications of
the new physics.

Another physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, in The Dreaming Universe, believed that
parallel universes might be the source of schizophrenia, visions, even dreams.
UFO sightings, he noted, seemed to many viewers to possess a dreamlike quality.
Could UFOs have an existence that was half in, half out of this universe? This was
taking Jung’s idea of manifesting archetypes into a more literal plane. It was
awfully close to the Borderlands folk or the contactees and their “ether.” The
things that were seen in the sky, this new way of thinking went, might inhabit
some realm halfway between the state of being a thought and the state of its
material existence. The key question, Wolf said, was how matter gave rise to
thought, “How does meat dream?”

Are these visions created by psychic disturbances? How literally are we to take
the idea of objects in the sky being manifestations of cultural unease? The idea of
one universe as the dream of another gave Dreamland a whole new meaning.

“Now, this one I took on the border,” Ford told me.

It showed one of the familiar round metal sensors, those strange mirrored
spheres, that mark the perimeter of Dreamland. But there was something else in
one corner. “See this?” she said, pointing to what looked like a boulder or a blob.
“I think this is a remote viewing blob.” The camou dudes, she suspected, could
carry out remote viewing of the border from their guardhouses. I did not ask why
they bothered to head out in Jeeps and Blackhawks if they could do this.

But remote viewing at “the remote location” seemed eminently appropriate.
Hadn’t the Army taken the technique seriously enough to spend tax dollars on it?

Remote viewing—the ability to see at a distance—is a paranormal technique
on which the CIA and the Pentagon had spent about $20 million and twenty
years. Also known by the wonderful phrase “anomalous cognition,” the idea was
developed by Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research
Institute in the 1970s. Their first and prime viewer was an artist named Ingo
Swann (Hollywood could never come up with names like these), who directed
the effort to turn remote viewing into a useful military intelligence tool. Fearing
an emerging “psi spy” gap with the Soviets, the CIA began funding remote
viewing and, later, handed the research off to the Army.

It began with some degree of scientific rigor, with the finding that some people

did a better job of, say, picking cards facedown on a table several rooms away
than they should have by chance alone. “Psi-hitting,” it was called. Then in
Project Grille Flame, later Scannate and Stargate, it was applied to such tasks as
discovering the locations of Soviet submarines or finding hostages in the Middle
East. But results kept turning up that embarrassed the Army. When the viewers
were directed to search for secret Soviet aircraft, they came back with reports of
UFOs.

Viewers were sometimes led through brainwave feedback and other techniques
in order to become more sensitive receptors. Two of the early remote viewers
were Ed Dames and Joseph McMoneagle. Dames claimed that “we employed
people who used altered states to take a look at the radio station in Tehran, Iran,
prior to our aborted rescue attempt.” Strategic locations in Iraq were another
target. The lack of success of those efforts makes one skeptical about remote
viewing.

I tried to think of remote viewing, perhaps charitably, as equivalent to
frustrated police turning to a medium to locate a body. The program was
operated in a series of shedlike buildings at Fort Meade, in Maryland. After the
military program ended, remote viewing moved into the private sector. Ed Dames
established a firm called Psi-Tech that did “business research,” or, less politely,
industrial espionage. For an auto company client, for instance, his viewers “go
into this library in the sky, if you will, what we call the matrix, the collective
unconscious, [and] pull out designs that were Japanese and German.”

Other alumni of the program were less positive. Joseph McMoneagle
disparaged Dames. Another veteran, David Morehouse, wrote a book titled
Psychic Warrior (1996), in which he declared that the feds had recruited him as a
remote viewer and then made his life miserable.

An associate professor of political science at Emory University named Courtney
Brown, whom Ed Dames had taught RV, had established an outfit he called the
Far Sight Foundation, and claimed to be able to view inside the Oval Office and
to visit secret bases on the moon and Mars. He envisioned our Mars probe being
destroyed by a defending alien craft. When he appeared on Art Bell’s Coast to
Coast radio show, he suggested that the comet Hale-Bopp provided cover for an
extraterrestrial spaceship that was heading for our planet.

The Heaven’s Gate cult latched on to Brown’s idea and stuck out their
figurative thumbs to hitch a ride. Before their mass suicide, they visited Las
Vegas and played the slots; some members may have attended a conference on
Area 51.

Ford’s notion that the camou dudes could remote-view, however, was a new
one on me. So was the idea that the presence of these remote viewers might take
the form of glowing balls.

“Does it really work?” I asked her.

“Sure, I’ve been taught how to do it. First, you have to give yourself permission
to let yourself invent. And when you understand it’s okay to make it up, then
they start to appear and you say to yourself, ‘Hey, I didn’t make that up.’ ”

“Can you remotely look over the hills here and see what’s on the other side?” I
ventured gingerly—over there, into the base at Groom Lake, into Area 51, into
Dreamland.

“Sure,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve been
there. It’s empty.”

26. The White Mailbox

Maybe Kathleen Ford was right, maybe the place was “empty” (whatever she
meant by that). Maybe the secret warriors had folded their tents under cover of
night and crept away. Maybe the cuts of the post-Cold War years had reduced
the role of the base. Maybe the glare of publicity had made operations untenable.

I remembered the statements a congressman made at the time Whitesides
Mountain was annexed to the restricted area. The watchers, he said, were a
tremendous inconvenience to the men at the base. They had to shut things down
when the watchers appeared. “It’s not fair,” he reported, almost petulantly. Bill
Sweetman thought that the cost of doing business in Dreamland had priced it out
of the market, that in the new, austere Pentagon, all the security and expense of
moving things in and out was too much. He thought the projects had moved
elsewhere. 1

In another sense, of course, it had always been empty, and that was its
attraction. We needed it empty to function as a container for speculation. You
could fill it up with whatever you wanted. Or maybe we had all emptied it,
squeezed out every bit of speculation, overtaxed that humble collection of Butler
metal buildings and big hangars and military-issue dorms, demanded too much
meaning from it. Perhaps Dreamland was full now and could hold no more of our
speculations or fantasies.

On the Internet, you could find this sentiment: “I hope we never find out
what’s in there,” a buff wrote rather wistfully. “I’d just like to observe something
about us Area 51 freaks. As much as we talk about wanting to know what goes
on in there, I think that’s all just posturing. What would happen if the U.S.
government opened its doors to us and let us see all that was going on?
Depending on what is there, we’d be either vindicated or disappointed, but we
would also rapidly lose interest. What would we focus our attentions on? Where
would we go next? ... The greatest thing about Area 51 is its mystery, otherwise
nobody would care.”

To push suspicion to the limit, some speculated that Groom had long been a kind
of Potemkin village, designed to draw attention away from somewhere else, to
hold down the armies of watchers the way the plywood tanks and fake
maneuvers of Operation Fortitude held down Panzer divisions before D-day.

Maybe the real projects were going on at some long-rumored “new Groom,” or
“baby Groom,” in Utah, in New Mexico, in Alaska, in Australia. “The new
Groom” became nearly as fabled among the stealth watchers as the original, or as
El Dorado among the conquistadores. Was it at Eielson Air Force Base, in Alaska,

where Agent X kept his eye out but whose vastness made Groom look like a golf
course? Or Pine Gap in Australia, perhaps—rumor had it that several Northrop
aerodynamicists, including the legendary John Cashen, had moved to Australia.
To Utah, near Dugway and the dreaded storage area for chemical and germ
warfare weapons? One top aviation journalist, who told me everything had been
moved from Groom, said, “We’ve heard the pulser jet in the Southeast, out in the
swamps.” Or was it all moved, as Steve Douglass had heard, to a new secret base
over the hill from White Sands in New Mexico? Steve Douglass and I went to
look.

I had driven across the lava plains north of the White Sands Missile Range, a few
miles north of the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. I had
passed the northern entrance to the range, called Stallion Gate, when a white
Blazer with official plates fell in behind me. The driver was speaking into a mike,
its corkscrew of cord trailing behind. I imagined him checking up on me and
grew nervous for no reason.

I passed through the Valley of Fire, a landscape of rough stones that resembled
coral, as if a whole beach of lava had been laid bare by a receding tide. There
was a rolling quality to the depressions and outcrop-pings, and you could almost
imagine that the rock was still liquid. Driving across it, I could understand how
looking at the relentless distance day after day could inspire despair—the despair
early settlers felt and tried to treat with whiskey and patent medicines.

Steve and I parked across from the fence at Holloman Air Force Base, where
the Aquarius briefings said the saucers had landed for treaty negotiations, and
Stealth fighters transferred from Tonopah trained in daylight now. Traffic
whizzed by with a heavy rush. Binoculars offered a terrorist’s-eye view of a base
that was like a movie set of an airbase: tower, water tank, palm trees. The F-117s
kept taking off over our heads, along with black T-38s. The shadows slid across
the pavement, which itself shimmered in cheap mirages.

The next day we stopped by the local BLM office, located in a modern
sandstone structure trying to look like WPA Moderne and failing. Three empty
government-issue office chairs held a conference in the lobby. I noticed that they
were the same kind of chairs as in the photographs of the Roswell wreckage, in
Gen. Roger Ramey’s office. I suspected I was overconnecting again.

We looked through the big maps, flipping page after page until we found the
right ones. Steve focused on the valley west of the mountains that sheltered
Holloman and the space harbor.

We stopped at a Dairy Queen to study the maps. A Mexican man with a black
Mephistophelian beard but contradictorily patient and gentle eyes walked in. On
his shoulder was a tattoo unlike any I had ever seen. I tried not to stare at the
tattoo, but it was irresistible. It showed a shapely woman wearing nothing but a
gauzy blouse and bandoliers of cartridges. The more I looked, the more the image

seemed to deepen and become solid. It shimmered like a printed reproduction of
a photo—stand far enough back and the dots merge, the image comes to life.
Depth establishes itself behind surface, signal overwhelms noise. I wanted the
message of the maps to become that clear, to tell us openly whether there was a
new base, and where behind the mountains it was hidden.

We focused our search on the Oscura Mountains. There was a new restricted
airspace, number R5107, and we first studied the aeronautical charts, the spaces
marked mostly purple and brown, then looked at the more variegated palette of
the BLM maps, indicating the usage and ownership of land with its melons, blues,
and yellows.

We trudged across White Sands, aiming at the tower of the old Northrup Strip.
Now they called the old strip “Space Harbor.” All we could see were the top of its
antennas and water tower, which barely peeked above the white dunes in a
thousand advertisements, when it had stood in for the Sahara, and for Mars.

Steve had been here before at night. Creeping over the brow of the last dune,
whiter than white by moonlight, he had seen the base unfold, crisscrossed by
huge laser beams and dotted with multicolored lights. Word had it they’d put in
the most powerful runway lighting system on the planet. The shuttle astronauts
could see it from space. They’d landed here once when bad weather spoiled the
usual landing strips at Edwards or the Cape, and for the first time the TV crews
were kept away from the landing.

Now in the daytime we crawled across the sand. The more we looked at the
maps, the more we drove and wandered through the rippled dunes, the more
hopeless and foolish we felt. You would have to have up-to-date satellite photos,
an airplane, and free access to the airspace to have even a prayer of finding
anything.

Yet there was always a Dreamland somewhere down the road. Its very name kept
turning up in the oddest places. I learned of a barbecue place in Alabama and a
spiritualist outfit in California called Dreamland. One Area 51 buff recorded with
excitement, “So, I’m driving back from Costco, listening to the rockabilly show on
KCMU and, I am not making this up, this song comes on about a rockabilly cat
who meets up with a space alien.” The alien asks to be taken to some place called
“the Dreamland Bar and Grill.”

“This New World Order is quite fucking real,” Joe Travis said from behind the
bar. A few minutes later he launched into an informal karaoke version of “Little
Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which had come on the
radio. It lent a nice air of menace to his warning. But Joe’s act was wearing thin.
There was a new mood around the Inn. Tourism in Rachel had become a tired
joke—“Area 51” was the punch-line—and some of the Interceptors were
becoming embarrassed by the whole thing. The Minister had had enough of the

Interceptor gatherings, and Mahood issued a “final report” decrying Lazar as a
liar and went off to graduate school to study physics.

Campbell, for his part, was growing both more distant from and more
possessive of the place. When a magazine report, riddled with errors, charged
that Area 51 had been shut down and its activities moved elsewhere, he reacted
not just with derision but with something resembling personal affront. He saw
himself as webmaster and moderator now, and something like superintendent,
too.

When it seemed interest might be waning and new material about the base
growing scarce, he even manifested an interest in stories of black aircraft that he
had previously shunned. He recounted, with uncharacteristic credulity, a tale of
seeing aircraft land on the base and then disappear, as if taxiing underground.

At the same time, he was tiring. In the summer of 1997, he married Sharon
Singer, his former assistant in the Rachel Research Center, and began to spend
more time in Las Vegas with her and her children.

Much as they might denounce the abuses of government secrecy, the watchers
had been drawn there by the mystery, and it seemed to me mystery was a thing
in short supply in the contemporary world. That was why so many TV shows and
movies worked so hard to provide it. Just as wilderness feeds and nurtures a
society that is overcivilized, mystery nurtures a society that is overinformed. The
unknown and unpredictable were rarer and rarer qualities in a world of vast
information storage and retrieval systems, of sophisticated planning, scheduling,
and prediction. We had a fundamental need for uncertainty (as much as we do
for order), but not necessarily the kind government secrecy provided. In the
spring of 1997, a report from a congressional committee that brought together
such odd bedfellows as Jesse Helms, Pat Moynihan, and Lee Hamilton proposed
declassifying anything older than ten years, with, of course, the usual “special
exceptions.” The committee estimated that there were some one and a half billion
pages of classified documents more than a quarter of a century old. It was a huge
time capsule, requiring expensive maintenance.

The usual talk of means of “penetrating” the perimeter continued: a model
airplane, a balloon, even a radio-controlled model car. Norio Hayakawa had his
own scheme. He began talking of a “Million Man March” to the perimeter on
June 6, 1998, the date he had said provided a conglomeration of multiple sixes,
when something dark and dangerous would happen.

One Saturday in late April 1997, four SUVs pulled out of Rachel and drove north
on Highway 375. About twenty miles north of town, they turned left on a gravel
road, rambled toward Dreamland, and pulled up to the new perimeter line of the
restricted area.

Some twenty kids emerged and began setting up easels and canvases in a neat

line, about six feet apart and at a 45-degree angle to the vista. Led by a man
named Joel Slayton, who taught at San Jose State University, these young art
students were collaborating on what Slayton called “a site-specific conceptual
artwork involving landscape painting as countersurveillance of Area 51.”

Painting the landscape in old-fashioned oils and acrylics, they were members of
“the CADRE institute” (Computers in Art and Design/Research and Education),
who thought deep thoughts about the nature of art and information and how
computers figured in to it.

As camou dudes trained their binoculars, Slayton felt a little creepy. What the
dudes made of it all, one can only imagine.

The group hauled their finished paintings back to Alamo, where they drew a
curious crowd at the local gas station, just around the corner from the first ET
Highway sign.

Slayton’s official manifesto declared, “The social banality of landscape painting
and painters was strategized to be used as a means of countersurveillance by the
surveyed, serving as a no-threat typology of threat. In this context the artists
demonstrate a perception of art as safe and innocuous, permissible and lacking in
relevant information content. The need to surveil such activity is both necessary
and unnecessary simultaneously.” Now Dreamland drew artists, who drew it.

The camou dudes, Slayton thought, were “serving as a critical agent to assess
the significance of the event and resulting information liability.” The whole
exercise, he proclaimed, constituted “critical discourse on the nature of
information culture and information systems.” It also seemed a pretty good
parody of us serious watchers of the area.

Slayton kept calling the place “a simulacrum.” No longer a real place, I
understood, but “a reality constituted from media folklore, super secrecy, and the
government’s denial of its very existence.” It existed “only as pure simulation,
constructed from the voluminous decentralized and publicly assessable [sic]
information that surrounds what might be there.” It was a “composited identity
formed of electronic networks, e-mail correspondence, and media folklore. Area
51’s notoriety as a physical and virtual tourist attraction provides a cultural
experience as information simulation ripe with conspiracy theory, Hollywood-
style potentialities, and the guarantee of being surveilled.”

At PsychoSpy’s Research Center, the paintings were placed on sale for $51.51
each with a 51 percent commission going to the Center. Buyers were asked to
document the location in which each painting would be hung and to “engage in
dialogue” about the whole experience via e-mail.

One frequent visitor to the perimeter happened to see the group and grew
suspicious. He was sure they were some sort of security force. They had short
hair, he noted, and looked like camou dudes. If they were painters, he said, then

he was a B-l pilot.

CADRE’s project made my line of inquiry seem positively casual and
unpretentious. Its members weren’t interested in aircraft or saucers or
holographic experiments; they were interested in philosophical “dialogue.” They
were among the most abstract visitors yet to the perimeter, highbrow, high-
thinking but, from my perspective, jesters still. If I had once naively thought that
by identifying the physical craft in the airspace of Dreamland we could then solve
its riddles, satisfy the conspiratorial and the curious, I now understood that no
rational explanations would satisfy CADRE.

Still, the military soon began to take CADRE seriously as a threat. While some
observers on the perimeter were sure that CADRE’s painters were cleverly
disguised government agents, some government agents apparently suspected that
they were spies or infiltrators. It happened like this: One of the CADRE members
had inquired of the Nellis base historian—who had shown me big, locked file
cabinets and had so little to offer about UAVs—if Nellis had received any e-mails
inquiring about Area 51. This was purely an exercise, since he assumed none
would be released. Not long afterward, he was sent, by anonymous e-mail, a list
of e-mail addresses at Nellis. Whether this was a prank or a piece of mischief
remained unclear, but Nellis authorities were not amused when CADRE
forwarded reports of its activity to those on the list. Nellis had been spammed.

In June, a few months after an April “paint-in,” Slayton saw a van trailing him.
The FBI looked into his activities, and the IRS suddenly manifested an interest in
the finances of CADRE.

Then the group sent a party to the land, about forty miles away, owned by
Michael Heizer, the artist who lived on a huge tract of land near Complex One, his
largest work to date. When several CADRE members, young enough to view
Heizer as a legend, tried to enter his compound and pay a visit, he proved highly
unappreciative. Slayton told me that Heizer threatened to charge them with
trespassing. So Heizer’s place, I hazarded, had become a kind of little Area 51?
Exactly, Slayton said.

Incorporating Dreamland into a high-concept work of art, as Heizer had, made
me speculate again about just how artful were Area 51’s own deceptions.
Consider that faceted camouflage, the essential form of military deception, of
visual disinformation, had been born in art. During World War I, Picasso and
Braque stood watching tanks and other camouflaged vehicles roll through the
streets of Paris. “Look,” Picasso said, “we are the ones who did that.”

The principles at work in this most basic form of deception were the same as
those of secrecy. Camouflage, like Cubism, offered bits and pieces, shards and
facets. Multiple viewpoints, multiple possibilities—that was all that was needed
to create noise, to disguise the real signal. Breaking up the shape into parts was

the equivalent of compartmentalization, the most valued intelligence strategy.

When I had begun spending more time on the Net tracking stealth chasers and
youfers, one day, on impulse, I did a search and typed in one word: “dreamland.”
The Internet, I knew, was well dotted with UFO and black-plane links and sites,
but only one reference came back: to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dreamland,”
stashed away in a university collection of great works of literature.

By a route obscure and lonely,

Haunted by ill angels only,

Where an Eidolon, named Night,

On a black throne reigns upright,

I have reached these lands but newly

From an ultimate dim Thule—

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

Out of Space—out of Time.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,

And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,

With forms that no man can discover

For the spirit that walks in shadow
’Tis—oh, ’tis an Eldorado!

But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not—dare not openly view it;

Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eyes unclosed;

So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;

And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

Poe is the patron poet of Dreamland. In The Power of Blackness, my old professor
Harry Levin had written, “Poe seemed at home only in Dreamland.” He dreamed,
another critic has written, quoting a famous phrase of the poet’s, of “a happier
star.” Poe is considered among the “Southern Gothic” writers, those authors W. J.

Cash described as “romantics of the appalling.” Romantic and appalling—which
describes what has happened in Dreamland very well.

Read just right, squinting under the Nevada sun, the poem anticipated
Nevada’s own Dreamland. “Eldorado” turned into a big old Caddy like those
parked at the cathouses west of the restricted area, and “the weak human eyes
unclosed” or “darkened glasses” evokes long camera lenses or night-vision
devices. “Haunted by ill angels,” well, there was the U-2, Kelly’s Angel, and
whatever other strange winged objects you wished to invoke. “Out of Space—out
of Time” recalled Lazar’s description of the saucer propulsion system, stretching
the space-time continuum, warping gravity, like a hammock’s net. The “black
throne” stood, of course, for the rule of the black budget.

There was the dry lake itself, I began to fantasize, in the poet’s “Lakes that thus
outspread / Their lone waters, lone and dead.” Warming now to the job like a
conspiracist making connections, I latched on to his “fringed lid.” A playful look
at the security lid, to be sure, and the “fringe” groups who visited there.

There were even stories that the Poe poem had been the inspiration for the
control tower name—suggesting that sitting out in an isolated base leads to more
reading than might otherwise be expected of military types.

Thinking about Poe carried me back to Freedom Ridge, and what I once saw
flying in the airspace of Dreamland: ravens, Poe’s totemic bird. My mind then
leapt to the raven I had seen in another place, which was closed off but visible,
another black box: Poe’s own room at the University of Virginia, in
Charlottesville.

Young Poe had lived there in 1826, before he was expelled from the university
for failing to pay his gambling debts. The wooden door has been replaced with
glass, as in a bank or department store. Visitors push a button and a dim light
comes on. You can see a crude rope bed with Jacquard coverlet, a desk, a pen,
and—some historical license—a stuffed raven. A black bird in an almost black
room.

The preservation of such a room as a viewable but unreachable space, part
memorial, part exhibit, strikes me as very like the Groom Box. It was like the
black world itself—a special exception, a dark chamber in the white and stately
colonnade of American life and polity. Thinking about Poe’s room, I believe I
better understood where the dark visions of the black world fit into the ideal of
American order. In the secret vaults in the capital where SAR programs are
reviewed, a heart of darkness behind the bright classical fagade. In the Black
Mailbox itself.

One summer day in 1996, I headed back up the road toward Rachel, catching a
glimpse from Hancock Summit of the hazy, hovering white stick of road that led
to the base. As the road curled around and began its long subtle dip—the Mailbox

Road stretch—I settled back into the familiar unfolding of the landscape, the
Joshua trees, the range of Jumbled Hills to the west. Coming down the big dip, I
nearly drove off the road as something caught my eye: The Black Mailbox was
white!

No longer the standard arched rural route job approved by the U.S. Postal
Service, it was now a big box of heavy steel, whose door swung on two heavy
hinges, with a grab handle from a workshop cabinet and locked with a bright
brass padlock. Steve Medlin had stenciled on it his name and route in black.

I walked all around it and noticed that someone had stenciled a tiny black
skunk on its back end—a wry comment, perhaps, that this thing was built like
the Skunk Works would build it. But it was white now, white as the camou
dudes’ Jeeps, white as Darkstar, white as the celebrated whale.

At the Little A“Le”Inn, I asked about it. “He got tired of people shooting at it,”
Joe Travis said of Medlin. “Shooting up his mail and all. Made a new one out of
quarter-inch steel plate. Now it would take a thirty-ought-six.” He snorted a little
laugh.

The steel might resist, but the white paint couldn’t. Soon after it went up,
someone spray-painted the new box black. Medlin repainted it white. I got the
idea this might go back and forth for a while.

There was a black mailbox out in front of the Inn now, but Joe said it was just
a replica. I asked what had happened to the original. A man on the stool beside
me said that it had been sent to be auctioned off a while ago to raise money for
town recreation, but a producer from Hollywood had preempted the sale with an
offer of fifteen hundred bucks. This seemed appropriate, but as with so much in
Dreamland, it proved impossible to determine conclusively.

For my father

Acknowledgments

Many people helped along the way, sometimes in a manner appropriate to
Dreamland—without being conscious of it. Steve Douglass and Stuart Brown
were vital as sources, inspirations, and friends. Paul McGinnis deserves special
mention for help and patience in teaching me all sorts of things. Glenn Campbell
deserves commendation, not just here, for his help, but from the public, for his
advocacy. The late Ben Rich of the Skunk Works was articulate and honest.

I owe debts of instruction and direction to: John Andrews, Michael Antonoff,
Eric Baker, Jim Bakos, Wally Bison, Peter Black, Dale Brown, Lowell
Cunningham, R. C. “Chappy” Czapiewski, Mike Dornheim, Mark Farmer, Bob
Gilliland, Peter Goin, Joshua Good, Jim Goodall, Norio Hayakawa, Steve Heller,
Steve Hofer, Gene Huff, Dean Kanipe, Jon Katz, Frank Kuznik, John Lear, Preston
Lerner, Tom Mahood, Mary Manning, Dave Menard, Peter Merlin, Randy
Rothenberg, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bill Sweetman, Jonathan Turley, Tim Weiner.

John Pike and Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, Derek
Scammell at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Matthew Coolidge at the Center for
Land Use Interpretation have all been helpful in this and many other projects.
Special appreciation to Randy Harrison at Boeing, Doug Fouquet at General
Atomics, Jim Ragsdale at Lockheed Martin, the estimable Drs. Young and Puffer
at the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center history office, and Sgt. James
Brooks at the Nellis Air Force Base public affairs office.

For support in work whose subject matter abutted and whose investigations
abetted this project: Kevin Kelly, John Battelle, Amy Howarth, John Plunkett,
and Louis Rosetto at Wired] Anita Leclerc at Esquire ; Connie Rosenblum and
Fletcher Roberts at The New York Times] Katie Calhoun, Richard Snow, and Fred
Allen at American Heritage] Chee Pearlman at ID] and Richard Story at Vogue.

Thanks to Tom for a vital clip on military monitoring and to Ben for a vital tip
on the New World Order. To Steve Guanarccia: I really am going to return your
copy of In Advance of the Landing, soon and gratefully.

Thanks to excellent book editors along the way: Walt Bode, Bill Strachan,
Trevor Dolby, but especially to David Rosenthal, for his vision and confidence,
Ruth Fecych, for her care and patience, and the eagle-eyed Benjamin Dreyer and
Evan Stone. I am grateful for years of help and advice from my agent Melanie
Jackson.

My most important debts are to Kathy, whose support went far beyond her
excellent reading and editing, and to Caroline and Andrew.

There were a number of people, of course, whose requests not to be mentioned
by name will be honored here, but who cannot escape being appreciated, and
thousands of others from whom I learned much through postings and comments
on-line.

Notes

CHAPTER 2: THE BLACK MAILBOX

1. Clouds in the desert take on a fascinating variety of shapes. But
especially remarked on in Nevada are the lenticular or lens-shaped clouds—
clouds that with the scalelessness lent by desert distance can seem very much
like flying saucers. Many servicemen in the area, especially those from the
East, are struck by them; they send photos back to their relatives and to
small-town newspapers. The images are sometimes printed as saucer photos.

Fascination with lenticular clouds has taken other twists. Youfers looking
at paintings and engravings have seen what most people would consider
clouds as stylized flying saucers. I picked up a volume of UFO lore that
contained a sketch of part of Piero della Francesca’s famous fresco series in
Arezzo. The lenticular clouds pictured in the book seemed to look like flying
saucers. But I looked up an image of the same part of the fresco in another
volume and found the clouds quite cloudlike in the original.

CHAPTER 4: AURORA

1. Reports of near midair collisions with mysterious aircraft were often
picked up by monitors of airlines’ radio traffic. The following is typical: “Last
night [March 3, 1996] in the early evening, Flight 573 of America West
Airlines was making a routine flight from Dallas to Phoenix when it came
very close to colliding with a very, very large triangle-shaped craft over New
Mexico at approximately thirty thousand feet. The craft, according to my
source, was not seen by FAA flight controllers, but was picked up by NORAD,
due to what was described as a doppler shift. The speed and direction of the
unknown is not known at this time.”

Another overheard tower transmission at Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport:

McCarran Tower/Departure: “United 278 please confirm your heading.”

United Flight 278: “Well, I wanted to confirm that. Seems like your heading’s gonna take us pretty
close to Dreamland.”

McCarran Tower/Departure (Aggressive, bordering on hostile): “United 278, I have no information
on a location called Dreamland!!”

CHAPTER 7: VICTORY THROUGH AIRPOWER

1. Using the Defense Mapping Area charts, Paul McGinnis (Trader)
assembled a list of other restricted military airspaces:

Area Number

Description and Comments

R-2306A

Yuma West, Arizona (Yuma Proving Ground)

R-2306B

Yuma West, Arizona

R-2306E

Yuma West, Arizona

R-2307

Yuma, Arizona (there is also a tethered balloon on

15,000-foot [4,615 meter] cables that carries a radar

pointed south, used to detect drug smugglers. This is
located near the northwest part of R-2307)

R-2308B

Yuma East, Arizona

R-2501E

Bullion Mountain East, California (Twenty-nine Palms

Marine Corps Base)

R-2501N

Bullion Mountain North, California

R-2501S

Bullion Mountain South, California

R-2501W

Bullion Mountain West, California

R-2502E

Fort Irwin, California

R-2502N

Fort Irwin, California (also includes NASA’s Goldstone

facility)

R-2505

China Lake, California (western part of China Lake Naval

Air Warfare Center)

R-2515

Muroc Lake, California (Edwards Air Force Base [AFB])

R-2516

Vandenberg AFB, California

R-2517

Vandenberg AFB, California

R-2519

Point Mugu, California (U.S. Navy-Pacific missile test

range)

R-2524

R-2914A

R-2915A

R-2915B

R-2918

R-2919A

R-4806W

R-4807A

R-4807B

R-4808N

R-4809

R-5107A

R-5107B

R-6604

Trona, California (eastern part of China Lake Naval Air
Warfare Center. Includes the “highly classified” electronic
warfare facility, the Randsburg Wash Test Range, also
known as “Sea Site I”)

Valparaiso, Florida (Eglin AFB, Air Force Development
Test Center [AFDTC])

Eglin AFB, Florida
Eglin AFB, Florida
Valparaiso, Florida
Valparaiso, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada (Nellis AFB)

Tonopah, Nevada
Tonopah, Nevada

Las Vegas, Nevada (R-4808N covers both the Nevada Test
Site and the Dreamland “box” around Groom Lake, which
is the rectangular region in the northeast of R-4808N)
Tonopah, Nevada (R-4809 covers Tonopah Test Range,
used for activities such as F-117 fighter testing and
Department of Energy programs, such as nuclear rocket
testing in thel960s)

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, also includes
Holloman AFB

Chincoteague Inlet, Virginia (used by NASA’s Wallops
Island rocket facility)

2. According to The Quiet Fire, a history of the band U2, the group took its
name in the late seventies at the fairly casual suggestion of sometime band
member Steve Rapid, who told bassist Adam Clayton about the spy plane and
punned it with “you too.”

3. Published in 1965, Mission with LeMay is a central document in the
history of Cold War culture.

One of its most fascinating passages is LeMay’s effusive comparison of
SAC’s organization to a B-58 bomber “weapons pod.” He did not latch on to
the obvious Freudian conclusions with which the thing fairly screamed;
instead he compares it to a jack-in-the-box in describing an inspection:

The chief of the ground crew and one of his men are up on the dock, engaged in removing a metal
plate from the fuselage of the aircraft. We stand and watch. Off comes the plate, and there is exposed
a labyrinth of silver and wire and plastic ... tiny colored blobs and shreds. That’s a meager crumb, a
mere sample of the electronic equipment which is stuffed and geared throughout the stiff flesh of the
B-58 ... Something like the business of that old-fashioned jack-in-the-box you had as a child ... You
look up at that plate, and the fuselage aperture, and vaguely you wonder: how are they going to get
that snake back in there?

They’ll get it back. And every tuft and every peg and every threadlike wire, and every infinitesimal
jewel of the complex array will have been tested and found to be functioning, before that slice goes
back on the aircraft—with reptiles arranged in designated position, before the plate is locked. The B-
58 is crammed with those thousands and thousands of working warming cooling bits of metal and
wire and tubing. Every available cubic inch within the body is occupied by such little monsters and
treasures.

... And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage—half-size, but still of
the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly—the B-58 carries
all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A
single B-58 can do that. It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London ... rubble of Coventry and
the rubble of Plymouth ... Blow up or burn up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg’s buildings, and sixty
per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay
waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen
and Dortmund add Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do
what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and
Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around
bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again. The force of these, in a single pod.

One B-58 can load that comprehensive concentrated firepower, and convey it to any place on the
globe, and let it sink down, and let it go off, and bruise the stars and planets and satellites listening
in.

Every petard, every culverin, every old Long Tom or mortar of a naval ship in the eighteenth or
nineteenth centuries, every turret full of smoky cannon at Jutland ... Big Bertha bombarding
Paris ... musketry of the American Revolutionary battles or the Napoleonic ones. Spotsylvania and
Shiloh and the battles for Atlanta. All the paper cartridges torn with the teeth, and all the crude
metallic cartridges forced into new hot chambers.... Firepower. All the firepower ever heard or
experienced upon this earth. All in one bomb, all in one B-58.

He went on: “The B-58 was and is symbolic of SAC ... If you removed that
plate from the body of SAC, you could look in and see people and
instruments. They would be as the intricate electronic physiology of an
airplane today: each functioning, each trained, each knowing his special part
and job—knowing what he must do in his groove and place to keep the body

alive, the blood circulating. Every man a coupling or a tube; every
organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers. All rubbed up, no
corrosion. Alert.”

The book also includes LeMay’s statement that while the Air Force had
never intentionally concealed information on UFOs, there were many
sightings for which it was never able to satisfactorily account.

CHAPTER 9: IKE’S TOOTHACHE

1. For other variations on the Men in Black theme, see Scott Spencer’s
novel (Knopf, 1995) of the same name, about a literary novelist whose work-
for-hire book on UFOs becomes a runaway bestseller, and Men in Black by
John Harvey (University of Chicago Press, 1996), which delves into the long
and complex semiology of black male attire, from Dracula to drag, Johnny
Cash to Johnny Depp—without mentioning “the UFO silencers.”

CHAPTER 12: LOW OBSERVABLES

1. The Soviets were so skeptical of the idea of stealth that they ignored the
implications of this study. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
describes how an imprisoned scientist who suggested a stealthlike program
was considered insane.

2. This quality of pornographic titillation extended to images of alien
spacecraft and alien bodies as well. In the September 1996 issue of Penthouse,
publisher Bob Guccione ran what can be described as a cheesecake shot of a
dead alien—as a centerfold. It was most likely a photo of a prop from the
Showtime network’s Roswell film.

CHAPTER 19: THE REMOTE LOCATION

1. Steve Douglass was astonished to see the pictures of Tacit Blue. He had
seen this plane, he told me, before he’d begun investigating secret aircraft. He
and his wife had been on vacation in New Mexico when they caught a
glimpse of the thing sailing through a canyon, almost below them and the
road on which they were driving. Indeed, it was that sighting that piqued
Douglass’s interest and inspired him to look into the whole world of secret
planes. But at the Air Force Museum ceremony, there was no reference to the
testing of Shamu in New Mexico, which probably occurred at the White
Sands radar cross-section testing facility.

CHAPTER 21: SPACE ALIENS FROM THE PENTAGON AND OTHER
CONSPIRACIES

1. Black aircraft continued to become part of conspiracist mythology.
During the 1992 presidential election, accusations were made stating that
Vice President George Bush had secretly flown to Europe in the backseat of
an SR-71 to meet with Iranian emissaries as part of the Iran-Contra deal. Only
by means of an airplane as speedy as the Blackbird, it was believed, could
this trip have been concealed.

2. The twisted connections between political conspiracy and saucer lore are
further illustrated in Popular Alienation, an anthology of conspiracist literature
from the Steamshovel Press. In the fevered essays gathered here, aliens
mingle with spies and Men in Black, the Moonies, the Trilateralists, and the
Bilderbergers, and all connect in seemingly simple, Lego-like attachments of
coincidence and suspicion.

3. Trademarks on Area 51 became abundant. One buff tracked trademark
filings and found twenty of them, in addition to the video game, trademarked
by Atari, covering clothing, toys, and even a registration for the use of the
name on “alcoholized lemonade and hard cider, beer, lager, ale, and malt
liquor, and carbonated soft drinks, namely root beer.”

CHAPTER 22: SEARCHLIGHT

1. Skunk Works buff Andreas Gehrs-Pahl compiled this list of classified
program names, the so-called Byeman Code Families, with his speculative
interpretations:

• BIG (USAF Reconnaissance projects / missions?)

• BLACK (USAF Intelligence-gathering projects?)

• BLUE (USAF Special electronics missions?)

• BRILLIANT (SDIO/BMDO projects?)

• CHALK (US Navy programs?)

• CLASSIC (US Navy Surveillance / C3I programs?)

• COBRA (Telemetry Intelligence / Surveillance of missile tests?)

• COLD (USAF high-altitude missions?)

• COMBAT (USAF Evaluation of new hardware, test missions?)

• COMMANDO (USAF Special operations?)

• COMPASS (USAF drone/RPV and SIGINT/ECM programs?)

• CONSTANT (USAF development projects / deployments?)

• COPPER (USAF advanced technology studies?)

• CORONET (USAF Electronic surveillance, and deployments?)

• CREEK (USAF deployments?)

• EYE (Weapons developed by Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, CA)

• GIANT (USAF SAC missions and projects?)

• HAVE (DARPA/ARPA or Systems Command [Materiel Command] programs?)

• IRON (USAF anti-missile programs?)

• OLYMPIC (USAF reconnaissance / surveillance missions?)

• OUTLAW (US Navy Surveillance / C3I programs?)

• PACER (USAF modification and upgrade programs?)

• PAVE (“Precision Avionics Vectoring Equipment”)

• PEACE (US DoD Foreign Military Sales [FMS] / MAP programs?)

• PRAIRIE (US Navy Intelligence / SIGINT programs?)

• QUICK (US Army reconnaissance / SIGINT / ECM projects?)

• RETRACT (US Navy programs?)

• RIVET (USAF Electronic intelligence-gathering aircraft?)

SENIOR (USAF reconnaissance or stealth-related aircraft / systems?)
SILVER (USAF ELINT missions?)

TEAL (Surveillance programs?)

TRACTOR (US Army programs?)

VOLANT (C-130 Hercules special missions?)

CHAPTER 23: “JOB KNOWLEDGE”

1. Inquiries brought this official response:

In response to your request for information concerning the Air Force’s facility at Groom Lake,
Nevada, the 38,400-acre land area once known as “Area 51” was withdrawn from public use by the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission more than 35 years ago under Public Land Order 1662 (filed June
25, 1958).

Since that time, the parcel has been used and administered as a national asset. Because DOE is not
now active there. Area 51 no longer appears on maps of DOE’s NTS.

Today that land area is used by the Department of Defense as part of its 4,120-square-mile Nellis
Air Force Range. For safety and national security reasons, air space above both the Nellis Range and
the NTS is closed to commercial aviation and the general public.

CHAPTER 26: THE WHITE MAILBOX

1. Even author Dale Brown dismantled the Dreamland of his fiction: In
Shadows of Steel, which was published in the summer of 1996, he describes a
spy shooting down a super-secret plane at HAWC—his imagined “Hightech
Aerospace Weapons Center” at Groom Lake. The incident leads to the closing
of the facility and the dispersal of people and equipment.

Bibliography

Assembling these authors and titles, I was struck with a mischievous sense of how
the accidents of alphabetization put sworn enemies side by side, pose the
conspiracist beside the technologist—a further reminder of how weirdly disparate
are the little Dreamlands so many observers have created. It’s as if all were lined
up—on Freedom Ridge, say—for a group photo.

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C. G. Jung. Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Translated by
R.F.C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1964.

Maj. Donald Keyhoe. The Flying Saucers Are Real. Fawcett, 1950.

Maj. Donald Keyhoe. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Henry Holt, 1955.

Philip J. Klass. UFOs Explained. Random House, 1974.

Curtis LeMay, with MacKinlay Kantor. Mission with LeMay. Doubleday, 1965.

Tony LeVier. Pilot. Harper & Row, 1954.

Michael Lindemann, ed. UFOs and the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints. The 2020
Group, Visitors Investigation Project, 1991.

William Lyne. Space Aliens from the Pentagon: Flying Saucers Are Man-made
Electrical Machines. Creatopia Productions, 1993.

Jim Marrs. Alien Agenda. HarperCollins, 1997.

Laton McCartney. Friends in High Places—The Bechtel Story: The Most Secret
Corporation and How It Engineered the World. Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Robert D. McCracken. A History ofTonopah, Nevada. Nye County Press, 1990.

Jay Miller. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works: The Official History. Aerofax Inc., 1993.
Revised edition, 1995.

Jay Miller. Lockheed’s Skunk Works. The First Fifty Years—The Official History.
Aerofax Inc., 1993.

Steve Pace. Lockheed Skunk Works. Motorbooks International, 1992.

Curtis Peebles. Dark Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S. Aircraft Programs. Presidio
Press, 1995.

Curtis Peebles. The Moby Dick Project. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Curtis Peebles. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994.

Chris Pocock. Dragon Lady: The History of the U-2 Spyplane. Motorbooks
International, 1989.

Francis Gary Powers, with Curt Gentry. Operation Overflight. Holt Rinehart
Winston, 1970.

Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt. UFO Crash at Roswell. Avon, 1991.

Richard Rashke. Stormy Genius: The Life of Aviation’s Maverick, Bill Lear. Houghton
Mifflin, 1975.

Richard Rhodes. Dark Sun. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Ben R. Rich, with Leo Janos. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at
Lockheed. Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Jeffrey Richelson. American Espionage and the Soviet Target. William Morrow,
1987.

Jeffrey Richelson. The U.S. Intelligence Community. Ballinger, 1985.

Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore. UFO Crash at Roswell The
Genesis of a Modem Myth. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Richard Sauder. Underground Bases and Tunnels: What Is the Government Trying to
Hide? Adventures Unlimited Press, 1995.

Alexander P. de Seversky. Victory Through Air Power. Simon & Schuster, 1942.

Michael Sherry. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. Yale
University Press, 1987.

Edward A. Shils. The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of
American Security Policies. Ivan R. Dee, 1996.

Brian Shul and Walter Watson, Jr. The Untouchables: Mission Accomplished. Mach I
Inc., 1991.

Erik Simonsen. This Is Stealth: The F-117 and B-2—in Color. Greenhill Books,
1992.

Michael Skinner and George Hall. Red Flag: Air Combat for the 1990’s. Second
edition. Motorbooks International, 1993.

Rebecca Solnit. Savage Dreams. Sierra Club Press, 1994.

John Steinbeck. Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. Viking, 1942.

Whitley Strieber. Majestic. Putnam’s, 1989.

Bill Sweetman and James Goodall. Lockheed F-117A: Operation and Development of
the Stealth Fighter. Motorbooks International, 1990.

Bill Sweetman. Aurora: The Pentagon’s Secret Hypersonic Spyplane. Motorbooks
International, 1993.

Bill Sweetman. Stealth Aircraft: Secrets of Future Airpower. Motorbooks
International, 1986.

Bill Sweetman. Stealth Bomber ; Invisible Warplane, Black Budget. Motorbooks
International, 1989.

Evan Thomas. The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared, the Early Years of the CIA.
Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Kenn Thomas, ed. Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader. IllumiNet Press,
1995.

Keith Thompson. Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. Addison
Wesley, 1992.

A. Costandina Titus. Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics.
University of Nevada Press, 1986.

U.S. Department of Energy. Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Nevada
Test Site and Off-site Locations in the State of Nevada. January 1996.

U.S. Department of the Air Force. AFP 205-37. Preparing Security Classification
Guides. 1991.

U.S. Air Force, U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Draft Environmental Impact
Statement, Groom Mountain Range, Lincoln County, Nevada. October 1985.

Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress. Man Made UFOs 1944-1994: 50 Years

of Suppression. Adventures Unlimited Press, 1994.

Tim Weiner. Blank Check. Warner Books, 1991.

John F. Welch, ed. RB-36 Days at Rapid City. Silver Wings Aviation Inc., 1994.

Lt. George M. Wheeler. Preliminary Report Concerning Explorations and Surveys ,
Principally in Nevada and Arizona. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1872.

Robert Wilcox. Scream of Eagles. John Wiley, 1990.

Robert Wilcox. Wings of Fury. Pocket Books, 1996.

Garry Wills. Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. Doubleday, 1985.

Fred Alan Wolf. Parallel Universes. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Chuck Yeager, with Leo Janos. Yeager. Bantam, 1985.

PERIODICALS

Rick Atkinson, “Stealth: From 18-inch Model to $70 Billion Muddle: Project
Senior C.J. The Story Behind the B-2 Bomber.” Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1989,
pp. A1-A38; Oct 9, 1989; pp. Al, A6-7; Oct 10, 1989, pp. Al, A14-15.

Andrew D. Basagio, “Area 51 and the CIA.” MUFON UFO Journal. No. 291, July
1992, pp. 10-12.

Richard J. Boylan, “Secret ‘Saucer’ Sites.” MUFON UFO Journal. No. 292, August
1992, pp. 14-15.

William J. Broad. “Wreckage in the Desert Was Odd but Not Alien.” New York
Times, Sept. 18, 1994, pp. 1, 40.

Stuart Brown. “Searching for the Secrets of Groom Lake.” Popular Science, March
1994, pp. 52-54, 84-85.

Stuart Brown and Steve Douglass. “Swing Wing Stealth Attack Plane.” Popular
Science, January 1995, pp. 54-56, 86.

Malcolm W. Browne. “Rumors of U.S. Superplane Appear Unfounded.” New York
Times, Jan. 19, 1993, p. C8.

Jane Castro. “Grapevine.” Time, May 25, 1992.

Jon Christenson. “How Military Secrecy Zones Out Nevada.” High Country News,
Dec. 27, 1993.

John Connolly. “Inside the Shadow CIA.” Spy, September 1992, pp. 46-54.

Elise DeMan. “Shooting Stealth.” Air & Space, pp. 92-94.

Michael Dornheim. “United 747 Crew Reports Near-Collision with Mysterious
Supersonic Aircraft.” Aviation Week and Space Technology, Aug. 24, 1992, p. 24.

Steve Douglass. “Flying Artichoke.” Popular Science, December 1994, p. 16.

John J. Fialka. “Clinton to Disclose Tab for Spying, Propose Overhaul.” Wall
Street Journal, April 24, 1996, p. 1.

David A. Fulghum. “Groom Lake Tests Target Stealth.” Aviation Week and Space
Technology, Feb. 5, 1996, pp. 26-27.

David Fulghum. “Payload, Not Airframe Drives UCAV Research Oversight.”
Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 2, 1997, pp. 51-53.

Marian Green. “Unions Win Representation Elections for Workers at Groom
Lake.” Las Vegas Review Journal and Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 17, 1996.

Gerald Haines. “A Die Hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.”
Studies in Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia.

Roy J. Harris, Jr. “Evidence Points to Secret U.S. Spyplane.” Wall Street Journal,
Dec. 4, 1992, p. B6.

Peter Heilman. “The Little Airplane That Could.” Discover, February 1987, pp.
78-87.

Fred L. Humphrey. “Geology of the Groom District Lincoln County Nevada.”
Nevada State Bureau of Mines. University of Nevada Bulletin. June 1945, vol.
XXXIX, no. 5.

Margaret A. Jacobs. “Secret Air Base Broke Hazardous-Waste Act, Workers’ Suit
Alleges.” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, 1996, p. 1.

Steve Kanigher. “Area 51 Saga Heads to Federal Court.” Las Vegas Sun, Nov. 3,
1997.

Frank Kuznik. “Aliens in the Basement.” Air & Space, August/September 1992,
pp. 34-39.

John Lear. “The Grand Deception: How the Gray EBE’s Tricked MJ-12 Into an
Agreement.” CUFORN Bulletin, March-April 1989.

Samuel W. Matthews. “Nevada Learns to Live with the Atom.” National
Geographic, August 1953, pp. 839-50.

Thomas P. Mclninch (pseud.). “The Oxcart Story.” Studies in Intelligence, Winter
1970-71, Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia.

John T. McQuiston. “Plot Against L. I. Leaders Is Tied to Fear of U.F.O’s.” New
York Times, June 22, 1996.

Peter Merlin. “Dreamland—The Air Force’s Remote Test Site.” Aerotech News,
April 1, 1994.

Peter Merlin. “Secret Base in Nevada Desert Suffered Effects of Nearby Nuclear
Testing.” Aerotech News, Oct. 20, 1995.

Peter Merlin. “Test and Decontamination Revisited: Operation Plumbob and
Project 5 7” Aerotech News, Dec. 15, 1995.

Gary Paine. “A Mine, the Military and a Dry Lake: National Security and the
Groom District.” Lincoln County , Nevada Historical Society Quarterly. Vol. 39, no.
1, pp. 20-42.

Phil Patton. “Exposing the Black Budget.” Wired, November 1995, pp. 94-102.

Phil Patton. “Robots with the Right Stuff.” Wired, March 1996, pp. 148-51, 210-
15.

Phil Patton. “Stealthwatchers.” Wired, February 1994, pp. 78-83, and “A Visit to
Dreamland,” pp. 80-81.

Gregory Pope. “America’s New Secret Aircraft.” Popular Mechanics, December
1991, p. 34.

Eileen White Read. “They Sneak Around, Learning What They Can About
Stealth.” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 1988, pp. 1, 25.

Randall Rothenberg. “Area 51, Where Are You?” Esquire, September 1996, pp.
88-97.

Rhonda L. Rundle. “Lockheed Employees Health Complaints Prompt Inquiries by
2 Federal Agencies.” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 3, 1988, p. 1.

Murray Schumach. “ ‘Disk’ Near Bomb Test Site Is Just a Weather Balloon.” New
York Times, July 9, 1947, pp. 1,10.

Murray Schumach. “Disks Soar over New York, Now Seen Aloft in All Colors.”
New York Times, July 8, 1947, pp. 1, 46.

William B. Scott. “Black Projects Must Balance Cost, Time Savings with Public
Oversight.” Aviation Week and Space Technology, Dec. 18, 1989, pp. 42-43.

William B. Scott. “New Evidence Bolsters Reports of Secret, High-Speed Aircraft.”
Aviation Week and Space Technology, May 11, 1992, p. 62.

William B. Scott. “Recent Sightings of XB-70-like Aircraft Reinforce 1990 Reports
from Edwards Area.” Aviation Week and Space Technology, Aug. 24, 1992, pp.
23-24.

William B. Scott. “Secret Aircraft Encompasses Qualities of High-Speed Launcher
for Spacecraft.” Aviation Week and Space Technology, Aug. 24, 1992, p. 25.

William B. Scott. “Spooks—It’s Time for a Revelation.” Aviation Week and Space
Technology, Dec. 22/29, 1997, p. 96.

William B. Scott. “Triangular Recon Aircraft May Be Supporting F-117A.”
Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 10, 1991, p. 20.

Bill Sweetman, “The Invisible Men.” Air and Space, May 1997, pp. 19-27.

John Tierney. “The Real Stuff.” Science 85, September 1985, pp. 24-35.

Donovan Webster. “Area 51.” New York Times Magazine, June 26, 1994, p. 32.

Christopher Weir. “Paint It Black.” Metro, Jan. 9-15, 1997.

James A. Williams. “Scanning the USAF’s ‘Area 51’ Mystery Base.” Popular
Communications, April 1995, pp. 8-9.

“Dumb Pursuit of a Smart Weapon.” New York Times, March 28, 1988, p. 18.

“Eisenhower Plays Golf on Vacation.” New York Times, Feb. 20, 1954.

“The Mystery at Groom Lake.” Newsweek, Nov. 1, 1993, p. 4.

“Out of the Clouds: Secret Stealth Fighter Gets More Exposure.” Wall Street
Journal, Dec. 27, 1989, p. 1.

“Possible ‘Black’ Aircraft Seen Flying in Formation With F-117s, KC-135s.”
Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 9, 1992, pp. 66-67.

“Scientists’ and Engineers’ Dreams Taking to Skies as ‘Black’ Aircraft.” Aviation
Week and Space Technology, Dec. 24, 1990.

“Secret Advanced Vehicles Demonstrate Technologies for Future Military Use.”
Aviation Week and Space Technology, Oct. 1, 1990, p. 20.

“Skunk Works Revenues Point to Active Aurora Program, Kemper Says.”
Aerospace Daily, July 17, 1992, p. 102.

“Tesla at 78 Bares New ‘Death-Beam.’ ” New York Times, July 11, 1934.

“TR-3A Evolved from Classified Prototypes, Based on Tactical Penetrator
Concept.” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 10, 1991, p. 20.

WORLD WIDE WEB SITES

Keeping up with new discoveries in Dreamland is best done through sites on the
World Wide Web. The following are the most useful, and all contain links to
other sites of interest:

Glenn Campbell’s exhaustive and indispensable Area 51 and UFO site:
http: //www.ufomind. com/area51 /

Steve Douglass’s Project Black site on black aircraft, plus the Intercepts newsletter:
http://www.perseids.com/projectblack/

The Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org/

Dan Zinngrabe’s site with extensive histories of Aurora, the TR3A, and Tier III:
http://www.macconnect.com/~quellish

Andreas Gehrs-Pahl’s extensive aviation site:

http: //www.umcc. umich. edu/~ schnars/aero. htm

Paul McGinnis (“Trader”) and the Freedom Ridge Oversight Council:
http://www.frogi.org/

UFO Folklore: http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/framemst.html
Parascope: http://www.parascope.com/

Tom Mahood’s Blue Fire page: http://www.serve.com/mahood/bluefire.htm/

ALSO BY PHIL PATTON

Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things That Made America
Open Road:

A Celebration of the American Highway

Razzle-Dazzle

Voyager

(with JEANA YEAGER AND DICK RUTAn)

Highway: America’s Endless Dream

(with BERND POLSTER AND JEFF BROUWs)

About the Author

Phil Patton is the author of Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things That
Made America, selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club; Open Road, named a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year; Voyager (with Jeana Yeager and Dick
Rutan); and other books.

He writes the “Public Eye” column for The New York Times and is a
contributing editor of Esquire, Wired, and ID magazines.

Mr. Patton has taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and
participated in a number of public television series. He grew up in North Carolina
and was educated at Harvard and Columbia. He has also developed World Wide
Web pages for Esquire, the New York Web, and Hearst New Media.

Visit Phil Patton at www.philpatton.com.

Dreamland

Travels Inside the Secret World
of Roswell and Area 51

Phil Patton